Nervous System Dysregulation: Could Trauma, Limbic Kindling & Vagal Dysfunction Be Why You’re Still Sick? | E187

So the point is like this phenotype, these cells, even if you detoxify, even if you do your mold, treat your Lyme, et cetera, if your nervous system doesn't feel safe, it will keep you stuck in this cell danger response and your body won't heal. Have you ever heard it could be all in your head? Psychiatric mental health issue. Or maybe you're just not quite in your head. It's amazing how many patients that I've seen have heard, it's all in your head. You're a psych case. Take your Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. Take your mood stabilizer. Maybe it's bipolar. Maybe it's a new type of bipolar, type 1, type 2. Maybe you're semi. Nervous system dysregulation is real. Limbic kindling is real. Vagal nerve dysfunction is real. Trauma, whether it's big T trauma, physical, sexual, emotional abuse, like an MCAS— I'm sorry, like a MACE event, major adverse childhood event. Or even microtraumas or what I call iatrogenic trauma, which is trauma that your health condition itself or the health system gives to you through stuff we do. These things are real. And, I want to talk about that next. If you're not getting better, if your health is stuck and you feel like you're stuck, why are you still sick? I found with a lot of my complex patients who I've worked with, mold, Lyme, autoimmune issues, gut problems, SIBO, hormonal problems, brain fog, whatever the waste The bag of things is that ultimately at the end, one of the things that almost all these people—I don't want to say all—but it feels like it's all these days—you get stuck with is nervous system dysfunction regulation. In my triangle of health, gut stress sleep. This falls in the stress thing. A lot of individuals need trauma work. I want to talk about that now. If you're not getting better, if you're stuck, if you're still sick, think about your nervous system itself. Think about the thing that regulates everything else because dysfunction here is real. And if you don't recognize it, and it took me years to come around to you know, and that's as I've grown in my career. I've grown personally and professionally. As my patients have progressed in their healing journey, I've progressed in my professional journey with them to be with, basically help them out as they've needed help. And now I'm settling into realizing that the nervous system itself can be dysfunctional. And there's a thing called the nervous system triad. It's 3 things in the nervous system that can keep you dysregulated, that there are things we can do to address it. The first thing is limbic kindling. The next thing is mast cell activation syndrome, which I'm not going to lean into too much. Because we've already talked about that. The third is vagal nerve dysfunction. Now, limbic— your limbic system is your ultimate survival part of your nervous system. Your olfactory nerve, your bulb, which is actually here at the cribriform plate, it's the only cranial nerve that does not have a regulatory center before it goes into your brain. So, what does that mean? When you hear things, you touch things, you taste things, you talk, that's going to communicate, going to regulatory centers A regulatory center to regulatory center before your brain actually gets the data. The olfactory goes right into your brain and it feeds right into your limbic system, which has your part of your amygdala, your cingulate gyrus. So, this is where emotion— it's basically where your emotions and memory process together. If your amygdala is big, which can happen if you're hypermobile, they tend to be a little bigger, but also can be a little bigger from trauma, et cetera, you tend to have a slower threshold You're triggered easier. Your nervous system is ramped up easier. You get anxious easier. You get stressed easier. You flip your switch, you rage, whatever your symptoms are happens easier. This can be a part of limbic system dysfunction. And, I get all my abbreviations mixed up sometimes. Multiple chemical sensitivity, which is a— the other term for it is the more official scientific term is TILT, toxic-induced loss of tolerance. That's in the literature. It comes up as TILT syndrome. In my world, we call it multiple chemical sensitivity. If you look in the literature, look up TILT, but it's actually where your limbic system becomes dysregulated and you start to overreact to chemicals, whether like environmental things, shampoos, detergents, foods. And then within your supplements, it can be like, it can be like the cellulose capsule or whatnot, but this all feeds into limbic system dysfunction. And if that's off, all of a sudden your threshold for your nervous system being triggered becomes a lot lower. Every fall, the schedule tightens and most of our attention goes to getting the kids ready. Almost none of it goes to the person holding the whole thing together. So I put together these 3 things just for that: a daily multivitamin in the active forms your body can actually use, quercetin and nettles to support your immune and respiratory health without the drowsiness, and NAC, N-acetylcysteine, to help your body rebuild its own antioxidant reserve. This is what I take every fall. That's aaronhartmanmd.com/backtoschool. Vagal nerve. What's vagal nerve dysfunction? Your vagal nerve, the wanderer, comes from your brain. It's actually the longest cranial nerve in your body. It literally goes all the way down through your internal organs, your colon, liver, spleen, kidneys, heart, goes on your heart and lungs. Lungs are a big input to the vagal nerve. And, there's a dorsal and ventral. And so, one part of the vagal nerve is like your freeze. You see a possum, they like the dorsal ventral vagus nerve. So, if you see a Some kind of freezing, act dead, play dead. That's if you get stuck, if something happens, if your response to stress is to freeze and you almost feel locked in, like you can't move, you can't talk, you can't think, you just can't, you're scared, but stuck. That tends to be overactivation of your dorsal vagal nerve. Your ventral vagal nerve is like your, your, you have fight or flight, you freeze. This is like the, you like crumble down, you crash out. Oh my gosh. I can't handle it. You just crash out. And if those are dysregulated, all of a sudden now, if you tend to be more like a freeze person, more of a crash, you just overwhelmed, I crash out. That can be a dysfunction in your ventral versus your dorsal vagal nerve. It's actually the term for this is the polyvagal theory. Dr. Porges actually wrote a book about in the early '80s, PhD researcher. So this concept has been around for not quite, actually been about 50 years. But think about if you have a dysfunction in your nervous system, either a limbic or your vagal, all of a sudden now, if you don't address that, it's going to, you're going to stay stuck in your, and if your nervous system is stuck, your body stays stuck. I didn't have these in my notes here of things to talk about, but there's a newer idea called the cell danger response, which is a really cool, fascinating idea. And GLP-1s actually help fix this. So maybe that's one of the reasons why GLP-1s appear to be this miracle drug, but we won't go into that today. But the cell danger response is literally your cell cycle, cells replicating them, controlled by the mitochondria. And when you're sick, toxins, Lyme, mold, whatever it is, this thing kind of gets stuck and you get senescent cells, which are kind of zombie cells if you heard that term. And you get this thing called senescent-associated secretory phenotype, SASP. I know, sorry, big words, but the basic gist is these dysfunctional cells become inflammatory and create cytokines. This is a part of long COVID. This is a part of chronic Lyme disease or long Lyme or whatever you want to call it, or illness or whatever. And if these become really bad, cancer is a senescent cell that ultimately becomes eternally senescent, i.e., it never dies and reproduces uncontrollably. So the point is like rewinding that back a little bit, this phenotype, these cells, Even if you detoxify, even if you do your mold, treat your Lyme, et cetera, if your nervous system doesn't feel safe, it will keep you stuck in this cell danger response and your body won't heal, which is a crazy concept. For me, it's such a cool concept because all of a sudden now it's like, ah, maybe I'm not stuck. Maybe we need to start doing brain retraining, dynamic neural retraining. We need to do primal trust. Maybe you need to do holotropic breathwork. There's a whole host of things you can do. Somatic therapy, parts therapy, EMDR, whole host of things you can do to reset your nervous system. The other thing I think about the cell danger response that's interesting is when that, when your cells are stuck, if you try to speed it up, you can feel sicker. Every fall, the schedule tightens and most of our attention goes to getting the kids ready. Almost none of it goes to the person holding the whole thing together. So I put together these three things just for that: a daily multivitamin in the active forms your body can actually use, quercetin and nettles to support your immune and respiratory health without the drowsiness, and NAC and acetylcysteine to help your body rebuild its own antioxidant reserve. This is what I take every fall. That's Aaron Hartman MD dot com slash back to school. So what does this look like? And some of you have experienced this, and a lot of you practitioners out there have done this and know I'm talking about. Let me give you methylating agents because you're. You have this gene, this MTHFR gene, the person gets worse. Oh, you need glutathione to detox. Let me give you glutathione. Ooh, you get worse. You can't handle sulfating things. People, when you do the right thing, it actually makes them worse. Oh, you're sensitive to this, you're sensitive to that. Actually, yes, they might have tilt syndrome or multiple chemical sensitivity, which is a limbic thing. Wait a second. I just said those are associated with nervous system and the cell danger response. Where this is actually living, where these reactions are living is actually in the cell danger response. The cells aren't cycling. You're forcing the cycle and it's feeding back into this whole thing. So all of a sudden now, for those people who are responding wrongly to the right treatments, cell danger response, i.e., the nervous system needs to be addressed. And this is really cool because it gives us another tool in our toolkit. There's some— one of the things I've done over the last 25, 26 years, I've been a doctor for 26 years now, medical doctor for 26 years, is just collecting tools for my toolkit. And it's really cool. This is one of the newer tools in my toolkit I've collected. It makes doing the foundational stuff even more important. Gut, stress, sleep. It makes doing the environmental stuff even more important. Yes. It makes all the things we talked about up to this point in time, makes them more important. But at the tip of this, if you're not getting better, if you're still sick, if you're stuck, it could be your nervous system. And then all of a sudden working on trauma, EMDR, tapping. I'm not quite sure when this podcast will go. We've created a lot of free resources on our website. I put together a whole trauma course on it, self-guided trauma thing that we make available to our patients. It'll probably be out. For general consumption by the time this comes out. If not, keep your radar up. We're all trying to put together free things for people. One of my things is we can't— our practice is busy. We see new patients. We're still seeing new patients, but we're busy and we can't— we can do 4 to 5 intakes a week. We can't do 20 intakes a week. So we try to make these resources available to people so they can start on their own healing journey. But back to the thing, trauma, salient response, vagal nerve dysfunction, all of a sudden trauma, stress, Seen in the light of limbic system dysfunction, vagal nerve dysfunction, and these different trauma things. We now have a reason why the cell danger response at the level of mitochondria, why this can make you stuck even if you've done everything else right. But that's the caveat. You've done everything else right and you're still stuck. Now, having said that, as I'm getting along in my knowledge about this, I've been in a group with Dr. Neil Nathan for several years and had a conversation with him not too long ago. But the point being is that I'm following his lead in some things. And the thing is like he's— and a lot of people in this world as well realize maybe we need to take trauma and put the front of the bus, not the back of the bus. How many of the patients who come to see me have already had some kind of big T, little t trauma, vagal nerve, et cetera, et cetera? And the answer is in the end, most of them. So it's interesting how I've evolved with my treatments and in this world in general, we're shuffling things around a little bit, realizing the nervous system dysfunction, dysregulation might be the reason you're stuck. You're still sick and not getting better. And addressing it can Unhinge and unlock your body's self-healing capabilities in a way you can't imagine. So it's really cool stuff. Anyway, I hope this information is helpful and we'll keep on going through reasons why could you be stuck and not healing. Take care. You came here for straight answers on your health, no hype and no gimmicks. We work hard to give you that on every single episode. So if you could do me a favor, that would be amazing. Leave a quick review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It just takes 30 seconds and that'll help other people find the same information you found helpful. Thank you so much.