From Trauma to Triumph: Mastering Emotional Fitness - Episode 309

People use this term nervous system regulation, but why are we. Why are you regulating? So, for example, if you're regulating a nervous system that's in a toxic relationship and you're using nervous system regulation tools to tolerate a toxic relationship better, that's a bad thing. We want to regulate the grief of leaving a toxic relationship. We don't want to regulate staying in it. Right. We want to regulate the fear of going for the goal, not the regret of not going for it. And there seems to be something about people who are really good with emotional pain have a harder time tolerating physical pain. And people who have a really easy time tolerating physical pain have a harder time with emotional pain.

Welcome to the Gladden longevity podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, where our passion is helping you to become an AJ hacker. On this show, we want to help you optimize your life energy, longevity, health and human performance with impactful and actionable information by answering four questions. How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? And how do we live young for a lifetime? Now here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Welcome everybody to the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden. And as always, we are here packing our ages. We're also asking the big questions. How good can we be? How do we make hundreds of new 30? How do we live young for a lifetime? How do we live well beyond 120? And how do we actually create a 300-year-old mind? And today we're going to be talking with Mastin Kipp. Mastin is really a world famous gentleman who's been very, very much involved with the nervous system and optimizing life by optimizing the nervous system. And that's really in the psycho spiritual space. I think you're gonna find this conversation really, really interesting. I joined it a little bit late. Anam Calabresi, who is co hosting some shows with me, begins the conversation and it really goes cool areas. So I hope you enjoy this. This is really a highlight of the Glad Long podcast.

What's up you guys? I'm Autumn Calabrese, co host of Dr. Gladden's Longevity. I am so excited. Today we are joined by Mastin Kipp. I've followed Masten, been a huge fan for so many years. I'm really excited to get to start this conversation with you. So welcome to the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I just think this absolutely incredible that you're here.

Thanks for having me. I'm super excited. And I've been mutual admiration society also, so thank you. Yeah.

So Madison, first of all, named one of 100 forward thought leaders by Oprah. You've been on Super Soul Sunday. Like, what an incredible accomplishment. You're doing so much amazing work, really helping people not just through trauma, but pass the trauma into living this beautiful, joyful life. So we're going to get into all of that today.

Yes.

Let's just start. You had a book come out last year, 2024, reclaiming your nervous system. I just want to talk a little bit. Can we talk first, just a little bit about reclaiming our nervous system? What happens when we experience trauma? You and I were just talking about the fact that, you know, we went through the pandemic and what kind of trauma that could have left on all of us.

Totally. Well, I think ultimately, if you think about anybody in the world, what's our ultimate goal? I don't think our ultimate goal is to survive. I think we all have something in us that wants to come forward, wants to be expressed, wants to be put out into the world. We want great relationships, we want financial abundance, we want a healthy body. And it's important to understand how we've been injured. Right. So if you're an athlete on, you know, trying to play at the highest level, you get injured, you're not going to ignore the injury. You're going to go and maybe a surgery of some kind and do a rehabilitation process. And then when you go back out in the field and perform again, you're not going to pretend like the injury never happened. And so I think that in the field of, in the fields of coaching, there's a big focus on the future and a big focus on goal attainment, which is important. But we pretend as if the injuries that we've been through, emotional injuries or relational injuries don't exist. And sometimes in the fields of therapy, what happens is we get so focused on the past that it's like, what happened to the beautiful life I was trying to create? And so really our focus has been about really bringing the past, the present and future together to understand, where are you now? How did you get here? But where do you want to go and why? And bringing all that together, I think the most important thing is understand that the way that you experience life is through your nervous system. And if you don't understand how your nervous system works, if you don't understand how your nervous system interpreted things in the past, and because of that, is Interpreting what we think is going to happen in the future. It's gonna be really hard to live the life that you wanna be living. And so understanding the first principles of the nervous system, to me is the foundation of not just healing, but also having an incredible life and certainly longevity, because the nervous system is how we experience life.

Okay, so let's talk about the nervous system, because that is so crucial. I know I come from a childhood with trauma in it. And, um, I think for a long time, personally, like, I would just suppress it and be like, I got it, I'm good, let's go. Not realizing sort of the damage that that was doing even to my body, physically, where that landed my gut, health and things like that. So can you just explain that a little bit for the listeners? Like, what do they need to understand about the nervous system and how it's going to be affected?

Well, the first thing to understand is we have evolved over millions of years and we are highly resilient as a species. So people have been through some of the worst things in the world, can still create beautiful lives. So the good news is, is your biography and your biology does not have to become your future. That's the first thing to understand. The other thing to understand is, is that the. The way our nervous system works is that if we go through experiences that are intense, whether you label it trauma or not is irrelevant. If you go through highly intense experiences, the nervous system is highly efficient at keeping things out of your awareness if they're super intense, as a way to protect yourself. However, over time, if that doesn't come into awareness, it can start to cause all kinds of problems. Because what happens is, is that when we go through something traumatic or intense, and it's called dissociation, something comes out of awareness that gets kind of stored away until we bring it forward and deal with it. It's going to manifest in all kinds of behaviors, physical symptoms that we may not want, lifestyle choices that we may not want. And so it's important to understand that, you know, we all have childhoods. I mean, name one person that's come from a functional family. I don't know one person who's come from a functional family. Everyone's come from a dysfunctional family on some level. Certain people definitely had more egregious experiences than others. But we all have something that we're holding out of awareness. And, you know, our prefrontal cortex doesn't develop until we're 25. So after 25, you start getting to these in the early 40s some of the strategies you use to be successful aren't working as much, right? You start to see some wear and tear in the body. You start to see some dysfunctions. Maybe the symptoms like you used to be able to push through, now you can't push through as much. We have to start to adjust. And there's different adjustments that we make. Obviously in the functional medicine space, longevity space. You guys are geniuses at all of the internal biochemistry that has to happen. But there's a lot of psychological pieces that has to happen too, in terms of recovering parts of yourself that were fragmented or left behind and bringing them into awareness now, but not so that we can just like let the youngest, most traumatized parts of ourselves run the show. We want to bring them into consciousness and then let who we are today decide what we want to do with it and be able to bring them forward into the future. And I think that it's important to understand that without doing that, you know, you're going to have some maybe mystery illnesses, right? Like, it's like, you know, that falls under the label of like, fibromyalgia. It would be a great catch all diagnosis, right? Or borderline, right would be another kind of like, catch all diagnosis. What is the borderline? If I were imagining, what does that really mean? Right? There's a lot of these strange illnesses. And you start to look at the biology of what happens in the body when those things are out of awareness. And you start to see sympathetic overdrive. You start to see low vagal tone, you start to see downregulated parts of the prefrontal cortex where maybe the left side's not as active, which is where seeking and goal attainment and joy and gratitude live. More overactive. Right side, which is more rumination, more active limbic system. And that becomes a bios, like a biological kind of like component to these parts of ourselves that we fragmented away. So we want to be able to bring all that stuff into awareness and take a multimodal approach to be able to do that. But it's important to understand that, yes, we've been through things and our goal is to basically rescue those parts of ourselves and bring them into consciousness so that we can be fulfilled, not so that we can let the most traumatized parts of ourselves run our lives.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think that's a really great point. I think we end up living in reaction to those experiences, traumas or whatever. And a lot of times we do it unconsciously. There are things that we are Conscious of that we're living in reaction to, like we're angry about something. But there's also things that are imprinted into the nervous system through those experiences that we sort of normalize. This is how the world is, right. And everybody must think this way or be this way. And therefore we go into life what I call being on tilt, right. Like a poker player that just lost four hands. You know you're on tilt, everybody knows you're on tilt. Everybody in the room knows you're on tilt, but you don't know it because for you it's normal.

Right.

So it's being able to kind of see what it is you can't see as well as see what you can see. And that's, that's actually, for me anyway, I started with what I could see and then it was okay, no, now I need to get to what I can't see. Right. Somebody else tell me what it is I'm not seeing. And then there's lots of people that are happy to do that.

So I have a question. Is there a way, like you said it earlier, Mastin, like, basically, like, you know, so many people will get into therapy and they spend so much time in the past and what happened and let me dissect it. So is there a way to bring those experiences, those heavy heart experiences, those traumas to conscious, but to also live a joyful life at the same time? Like, do we have to analyze it all and then we get to be happy or how do we do it at the same time?

Totally. So a few things. First of all, you must start with the assumptions of the practitioner that you're working with. Okay. So in any field, whether it's a coach, a therapist, a doctor, right. Whenever someone gives me a prognosis on anything, whether it's achieving a goal or, you know, if I'm helping a family member through an illness, right. And someone comes to me and says, this is what's going to happen in my mind. I put in parentheses. Yeah, with you.

With you.

Right. Because there's this thing called the Pygmalion effect where we tend to live up to the expectation of people around us. Right. And so the first thing is you want to be able to make sure that your team, the people that you're working with, believe not just that you can get better, but that you can thrive if they don't believe that. There is no such thing as false hope. Hope is binary. You have it or you don't. False hope doesn't exist. So the number one Thing is, you want to start with a hope filled team who can see you thriving. Not just coping, not just surviving, but thriving. That's so critical. And then the other thing to understand is we don't need to go digging for things unless it's actively getting in the way of what's happening for you right now. If you're not able to get out of bed, if you're not able to achieve a goal, if you're not able connect with your partner or have a great sex life, whatever the block is, if there's something that's presenting, we want to find the root cause of that. And there's lots of ways to bring it to consciousness. In functional coaching, we have a process of just, you know, looking at a behavior and tracing all the way back to like the original incident of where that came from, but then working to what we call create a corrective emotional experience, which is, let's look at the dynamic of how this happened and then what did you actually need? And start to give yourself what you need. Because I think sometimes within the trauma conversation we get so focused on regulating stress or not being depressed, there's a negative association to it versus while the stress of depression exists. What if there's a lack of nutrition? Maybe I have a oxytocin deficit, which means I need a hug. Maybe if someone was dehydrated, you're not going to say, well, when did you first get dehydrated and what happened? And let me understand the mechanism, you just give them water with electrolytes, right? So we have to understand what is the nutrition, the relational nutrition, the self care, what is the corrective experience needed? Because our nervous system starts to expect things unconsciously. And if we can break that expectation, it's called a disconfirming experience or corrective emotional experience. We can understand what happened, what was missing. And then it's interesting, once you give someone something that they need that they didn't have, the nervous system starts to correct. Especially if you can do that multiple times. Right. And so there's lots of different ways to do that that make it less painful.

Right.

A lot of the psychedelic assisted therapies that are out there help with this. A lot of the longevity treatments, like if you, if you have a ptsd, for example, there's a whole field of research coming out now that's looking at PTSD as a metabolic issue. So maybe with your PTSD treatment, maybe you want to do some psychedelic assisted work, maybe you want to find purpose and meaning, maybe you need some nad also because your energy is super low. Right. So there's lots of ways to do it more intelligently than we could before. But it starts with the team that you surround yourself with. Because if, like, their baseline is, my assumption is you have a mental illness and I'm going to give you a diagnosis and it puts you in a symptom cluster and that's it. And your job is to cope. That's as far as you're going to get with that person. Right. So you got to make sure that your team is on board. And then also, is it practical? Is it pragmatic? Is this needed? We don't need to go digging for stuff just to dig for it. We want to dig for it, find it, but then create the corrective emotional experience. What people sometimes do is they find the trauma and they go, well, I can't now because of my trauma. And it's like, hold on a second. If you got through that, you can get through the healing. You know what I mean?

Yeah. It's an important thing, people. It's a. It's an identity thing. Right. People tend to identify with their trauma. So the way I think about it is we end up telling ourselves stories, right? And those stories become an identity. And part of the healing is ultimately to die to those stories, right? And kind of be resurrected. These almost a Christian paradigm here, it's almost died of those stories. Be resurrected into a life where you're unencumbered by those stories. Right? So the question is, how do you. How do you die to those old stories? Well, part of it, since the way we think about it, is that people have different genetic predispositions to be more or less impacted. So one of the first things we do is what's somebody's genetics, right? Whether it's alcohol use or trauma or ptsd, the genetics will actually tell you a lot. And then from there, we know it was an experience, and it's nice to identify cognitively kind of what went on. So at least people know what we're talking about. They can articulate it, and that's helpful in initial healing. But to actually really heal it, it takes another experience to overwrite the software. You've got to rewrite the software, right? And so the hug, whatever. What did you need? What's. What's the corrective experience that you're talking about? Masten, I think, is exactly right. And one of the things about psychedelics is that they can create an experience that can rewrite the software, right? And that's. That's how psychedelics work in this space from, you know, the work that I've done with them. So I think, I think there really is a path forward. I think what's interesting to me, and I think you made a beautiful point there about the fact that your, you know, your ultimate outcome is going to be a function of the limitations of the person you're working with. Right. That's really kind of what you were saying, to paraphrase it. And so it's really important to be working with somebody that sees you as an unencumbered, whole, free, fully expressed human being that you're here on the planet to be and become, and that's who you want to work with.

Let's talk about the psychedelics for a second because I do think that people are going to be really curious as to what specifically you're referencing, how that might work. And like Dr. Gladden, you said that could create an experience. Can you? Because I am not. I mean, I'm familiar with people talking about ketamine therapy, but I. This is not something I have ever tried, so I'm curious what that is and how it would work.

Totally. Dr. Gladden, you want to go or.

Yeah, I'm happy to, but I'm also happy to follow you since you're the guest.

I mean, I, I have, I have opinions and I studied the research and I have experiences. So. So first of all, psychedelics are ancient. So this is shamanistic work we're talking about. And what's happening now is we're getting empirical data to back up what shamans have known for a very long period of time. Just so we're super clear, psychedelic and shamanism around for tens of thousands of years. The DSM has been around since 1952, just so we're really clear about that. So this is, we're tapping into ancient wisdom. If anything, traditional medicine is alternative because this has been around a lot longer. In a way, this is the ultimate traditional work in a lot of ways. Now, different psychedelics have different, what we call mechanisms of action, which means how they work in the brain. And so depending on what your goal is. But you have to understand when you experience trauma, the first thing to get is that the state of trauma is what's called a non ordinary state of consciousness. So when you're in a PTSD experience or when you're in something that causes an overwhelm, especially if it's consistently or chronically over time, or if it's, you know, something in war or neglect or whatever might be you put yourself into A non ordinary state of consciousness that becomes habituated or normalized over time. So what do psychedelics do? Fundamentally, they put you into a non ordinary state of consciousness also. And there's a lot of different mechanisms that happen, but some of the overarching universal mechanisms that happen in the brain, for example, if you're a jerk to yourself, you say bad things to yourself. Anyone's ever been a jerk to themselves, and they talk bad to themselves, right? That comes from what's called default mode network in the brain. The default mode network is self referential processing. It's what you think about yourself. It's your internal working model, who you think you are. Right. Psychedelics lessen the connections in the default mode network. So who you are, who you think you are tends to lessen dissolves, meaning you're not so much of a jerk to yourself anymore for a period of time. With ketamine specifically, which you talked about, Ketamine is also an anti glutamate, so it basically pauses the sympathetic nervous system. So stress just kind of stops. So Xanax will like flood your brain with gaba, which is creates all these new receptors and creates dependency and stuff like that, which is bad. Ketamine just kind of says timeout on, on stress for a second. It calms the limbic system, it calms stress, and it creates a dissociative effect, which means you're further away from something, you're not associated to it. And that impacts the salience network, which is your awareness of your body is also lessened. So with ketamine specifically, who you are tends to dissolve a little bit. And what you are, your body tends to dissolve a little bit and you're less stressed. And by the way, it boosts prefrontal cortex activity, which is where all this stuff gets put together. So you get this kind of like mindfulness experience. And depending on how much you do, you could meet God or something like that too. So it depends on the dosing, right? But, and then also there's usually like a 3 to 10 day post ketamine experience of what's called neuroplastic window, where, where you can kind of make new decisions because there's a little bit more lubrication in the brain and stuff like that. And so like there's different mechanisms depending on the goal. With say psilocybin, it's more a serotonin boost. So there's more of this like kind of this big heart love type energy, but it also amplifies all emotions. So sometimes if you really want to get in touch with emotion. Psilocybin might be something that you want to do if your heart is closed and you don't feel joy. MDMA tends to be more of a joy amplifier. So these different psychedelics have these different mechanisms. They're slightly different, but they all act on the default mode network. They all tend to boost prefrontal activity, all tend to calm the amygdala on some level, but they just have different neurotransmitter pathways that they work on depending on the goal. And we're understanding this more and more and more as the research is emerging. Does that make sense?

Yeah. And so as you're doing these therapies, are you, you're doing them, I'm assuming a doctor is administering?

Yes. I mean, you hope so.

Right.

Some of these, some of these things aren't legal yet, but. Or some of them are decriminalized. You know, MDMA is on the brink of FDA approval. It's phase three right now. Psilocybin has been given a breakthrough designation by the FDA. In fact, just last week, 5 Mao DMT Nasal was just given breakthrough designation by the FDA also. So ketamine is a Schedule 3 that's been around for a long time as an anesthetic and for, you know, surgeries and stuff like that. So there are. The thing about ketamine, though is that there's no established protocol because it's already a Schedule 3. So the drugs that are being, you know, queued up now, they're coming out with protocols also. So it's. The ketamine stuff is a little bit of a wild west. So you definitely want to make sure that you're with the right practitioner. Because in all the psychedelic research, what's clear is yes, these agents work, but the actual mechanism of change is the safety and the relationship between you and the practitioner. So if you don't have that, you're not going to have much change.

So is it like doctor and therapist sort of. Is it, is there a therapist walking you through asking you questions?

Are people. It depends on what you're doing. Okay, so there are some other ones out there as well. You know, San Pedro is a very heart opening psychedelic. And. And then you've got the DMT, right, the 5 Meo DMT and you've got ayahuasca and which is a prolonged DMT experience. And you know, the way I think about it is that they are, each one is different and each strain of psilocybin, each strain of mushroom is different. Right. So there's lots of variation. I think the difficult thing for somebody that's on the outside looking in is to say, where would I start and who would I, who would I work with? And that's where you want to find someone who's actually been trained.

Yes.

You don't want to talk to your buddy down the street. You want to. And there's a whole certification program for the use of psychedelic assisted therapies run by the International Psychiatric Society or something. But the IPI that does some really rigorous training for people so they actually understand how to manage if there were to be a complication, but also how to understand the medicines and how to appropriately apply the medicines and which medicine somebody is most likely to respond to. Right. So yeah, it's, it's very, it's very nuanced. And then there's ibogaine also, which is a real heavy hitter in terms of PTSD and kind of rewiring the brain. You know, my sense of it, and I do have a number of experiences here, is that when you go into these spaces, it gives you a new set of possibilities to work with. All of a sudden it's like you're not married to the past. You're actually seeing things through a different lens. You're experiencing, quite honestly, the physical world through a different lens. You're experiencing your own mind through a different lens, your own body through a different lens. And all of a sudden you realize that everything that you thought was kind of hard and firm, and this is how it is. It's not. It's just your brain actually making that up, so to speak. Our brains create the reality. And so when you understand that there's that plasticity and what can be, it gives you more confidence to say, you know, I can lead a completely different life. I can choose to be happy and living gratitude and, you know, from a loving place, create joy for myself and the rest of the planet, right? And so it's very, very encouraging because if you haven't had the experience, how do you know what it's like to laugh if you've never laughed? Right. I mean, it's. You can look, something can tell you about it all day long, you know, just a laugh that you can't control. But if you've never experienced it, you've got to experience it, right? So the psychedelics help open up that kind of experiential impact of re establishing the experience, override the software to give you new hope and new ways forward. And then if you do the integration work, which I think is actually the most important thing, to work with somebody on the back end of it to say, okay, what does this mean? And how do we integrate it? And how do I, you know, heal the things that were there before and actually transcend them and become grateful for them because they've opened me up to all this beautiful opportunity in front of me. That's kind of the, the full circle of it as I see it.

So. Well said.

So, okay, another question. I recently had brain imaging done to find out just how my brain works. Like, I was very curious about it and not, not in a. Like I wanted to know, where's the blood flowing? Where is it? Is it flowing properly to the areas it should be? Is there actual physical trauma that has happened in my brain? Because I know I've had a couple concuss questions in my life and so got all those results back and found out a couple of very interesting things. This is just for me, but I have a question. So for me, the way the doctor explained it, based on the blood flow to certain parts of my brain, she could tell that there was actual physical trauma to. I want to say it was maybe my temporal lobe. She was like, that's probably a head injury. I said, yes, the car accident. I think my head hit the window. And then there was like a little more blood flow to one area that they would not expect for a woman my age. Although she said my brain was super healthy. But she was like, you're a glass half empty kind of person. You're waiting for the, like, that's how you're experiencing the world. Because this part of your brain is lit up more than it should be. So if you are positive, it's probably harder for you to get there because you're waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That's right.

So when we're talking about this, dealing with trauma and finding the joy past these experiences, we're all, we all have. You know, I count my blessings that I'm able to go do a test like that and find that information out. She also told me I ruminate. She's like, you're a ruminator. I could tell because of what's lit up, which is also true. So if I have that sort of working against me a little bit because those things are just how the blood is flowing. What if somebody doesn't know that? Because people will take that as your personality. People will say, well, you're just negative. Or, you know, God, you get so fixated on one thing and you can't let it go. And they think that that's just you being stubborn. So, 1. How do we all start to realize and accept each other that, hey, we have different ways that our brains work? And then also, how do we start to move past those things to get to the joyful side?

Totally.

Yeah. It's interesting approach. Madison, you go ahead and then.

Yeah. So. So. So, first of all, it sounds like you did some SPECT imaging, I think.

Yeah. Amy Clinic spec scan is what it sounds like.

Not eeg. Yeah.

Okay. So.

So. So if we just. So, first of all, it's awesome. It's beautiful. I've sent people to Amen and they realized they were medicating the wrong part of the brain. So, like, God bless Daniel and the work that they're doing there. It's amazing. So what I can tell you is that just universally, first of all, nervous system states become personality traits over time. Neuroplasticity works both to make you a jerk and an angel.

Right.

You can. You can habituate to depression with neuroplasticity, and you can habituate to joy with neuroplasticity. So the good news is, until you're dead, your nervous system, your brain has the ability to change. Everybody does. Just so we're clear about that. The other thing to understand is specifically about rumination. What we know in the literature is that rumination is a combination of an overactive limbic system where the limbic system is just like on, meaning where the fight or flight system is right, but it's paired with the right, not left, the right prefrontal cortex. So if you're in hypervigilance, which is what you're describing, your threat is always happening. First of all, there's body threat that's happening, which means vagal tone is probably low. Sympathetic nervous systems probably habituated to being on, which means you probably have HPA access issues. I could imagine gut digestion issues, like all kinds of things that go along with that. So your HBA axis is kind of fried, vagal tone is kind of low. And if your brain is kind of stuck in this fight or flight place, what happens is limbic system is, like, has a six pack, basically, and it connects to the right prefrontal cortex, which is creative, and comes up with all of these what ifs. So it's fear, which is limbic system, plus autobiographical memory, which is limbic system. So it's. I'm afraid of my memories and I'm imagining more of them, basically, is what starts to happen and it gets locked. So that state becomes a trait because neurons that fire together, wire together, and you get locked. And so that's. So someone's in OCD or habituation of any or rumination, any kind biologically, that's likely what's happening. What's this fix? Well, we want to down regulate sympathetic. There's lots of ways to do that. My favorite way to do that is what's. What's called a stellate ganglion block, where they do a nerve injection into the stellate ganglion, which is a nerve cluster on both sides of your neck. And they. It's like analgesic. It's a 15 minute procedure. And it's like an off switch for the sympathetic nervous system, because the sympathetic nervous system goes up and down the spine and goes into the brain through the stellar ganglion. With the stellar ganglion block, it just turns it off, basically so that that kind of like pattern stops so you're not in this frozen state. The other thing to know is that if my amygdala and limbic system is firing and my right prefrontal cortex is really strong, and that connection has been happening, I need to boost the left side of the brain, the left prefrontal cortex. So there's a beautiful therapy called TMS that basically stimulates the left side of the brain. And what happens is the left side of the prefrontal cortex, that's joy, that's goal attainment. That's where seeking comes from. That's where like optimism lives. So basically the way I would describe it is likely your limbic system and your right prefrontal are like locked in there. And they've been. It's kind of like, like you've ignored your legs, right? You've trained upper body, but like the left prefrontal cortex is like your legs. So you had like practice, gratitude and like the, the rumination is like, no, I don't want to do it. Stress, right, Practice, optimism, Ketamine and some of these other agents can help lessen some of those connectivity connecting points also. But if you understand fundamentally, biologically, my goal is to calm limbic activity and right prefrontal cortex dominance, to calm sympathetic dominance and to grow the left side of my prefrontal cortex through joy activation. Practicing gratitude, tms, whatever it might be, it helps you understand it's not you. It's just a biology, right? And if you have that data, you can share that with others also and start to recognize, well, they're not grateful or they have a really strong right prefrontal and really strong limbic system and their left prefrontal cortex just. They haven't gone to the gym for that, basically. Right. And so, like, when you think of it that way, it's less personal. And that's why I love saying the biology of things, because every experience we have has a. Has a mechanism in the body. And if we can understand the mechanism, it's not an identity anymore. It's just something that's happening.

I think it's just so fascinating to know because so many people, we've said it, you know, the experience happens. They sort of become that experience. I can't move past this. I'm always going to only be this because this bad thing happened to me. And recognizing that there are so many things that are in our control to change it, to improve it, and to get to that joyful place. I think that that's encouraging.

It's super encouraging. Yeah, it's super encouraging, really. And the way. The way that we go about it is. Is very similar to what Madison's talking about. And of course, because we're starting off with genetics and everybody that's kind of a ground floor, we can actually see who's predisposed to rumination, who's predisposed to depression, and through what mechanisms. Like, in my own genetics, I'm predisposed to depression. Right. And I. And I suffered with depression at various points in my life. And it wasn't until I did the genetics and figured out, oh, I have an MTHFD1 SNP that's homozygous, and I don't methylate well through several other genes. And if I simply get myself on the right combination of B vitamins and send some Sami, right, To help boost serotonin and dopamine production, I don't get depressed anymore. So you have to realize that it's really important for the listeners to understand that even though you were born with a certain set of genetics, it's a manipulatable scenario, right? They're basically levers you can pull. And no, you're not going to grow from 5ft to 6ft, but you certainly can change the way your brain works. And even if you're predisposed to OCD or anxiety, because there are genes that predispose people to that, there are levers you can pull, there are supplements you can take that actually help you to make that transition. So it's not just you kind of trying to will yourself out of where you are currently. And then if you do that and you add in, you know, good therapy for deeper understanding, and you add in some of these experiences, which can be, you know, they can be somebody giving you a hug or having a close friend, or a really super close relationship with a loving partner, or a psychedelic assisted therapy. Then all of a sudden you can actually really flip the script on yourself. And all of a sudden it's like, what do I want to be right? I think if you're listening to this, you should ask yourself, how do I really want to be right? Because I don't necessarily want to be glass half empty. I want to be glass half full. Well then, okay, if you want that, then the question is, well, how do I get that? And since everything happens, I think with the questions you start asking, that's what's going to empower you. You don't want to identify with anything except what it is you want to be. I think that's a big step. So.

Yeah, yeah, very important. So if we're talking all about this, let like using the word joy. Madison, how would you define the word joy, especially like from the nervous system perspective?

Well, from, if we go pure nervous system, joy would. You could, you could call joy the ultimate purpose of the nervous system. So if you look at how the nervous system's evolved, we have these sort of like, through polyvagal theory, we understand with these sort of three parts of the nervous system. We have the dorsal vagal branch, which is sub diaphragmatic. We have the sympathetic nervous system up and down the spine, and we have the ventral vagal branch, which is from the diaphragm. And part of the nervous system is also the brain. And the most advanced parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, have the most opioid receptors of anywhere in our body. What does that mean? It means that evolution prefers an opioid experience. And by the way, joy is an opioid. Just so we're super clear, right, that those types of feelings are opioid urgic. They're joyful experiences. So joy is kind of our best biological advantage. And if you think about collaboration, you think about working together, you think about, you know, what makes, gives us a competitive advantage. It is those, those joyful states. You come up with better solutions, better answers. You're also typically living with purpose and meaning. You're not in isolation, you're together. There's a lot of things that have to happen for you to have joy. That's not coming from a pill, right? And so it's the. I think joy is our ultimate purpose. And I'm not saying that just like esoterically or just spiritually. Though I do believe that to be true. The biology, the evolution, shows that the joy receptors have been not just preserved, multiplied as we've evolved. And so that tells us that evolution, whether you believe in God or not, that's your. Personally, I do. But evolution, even if you're an atheist, you got to get on board with this. Evolution prefers that we're in a joyful state. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing the multiplication of opioid receptors. As our machinery becomes more advanced, we see the pruning of it. It'd be hard. That wouldn't be about. So to me, joy is the. Is the goal. It's the best survival strategy. It's the best place to come from in terms of any type of relationship. I mean, someone's in a bad state, think about that. If you're in a negative state, you're not gonna have a great relationship.

Right.

If you're in a negative state, you're probably not going to be producing the best outcomes in your business. Right? So. And this is not false positivity, by the way. This is like legit joy. We're wired for it, and it comes through relationship. It comes through purpose, it comes through meaning. It comes through knowing what you need. It comes through how you communicate to yourself. It comes through how you communicate with others. All those things help us live in that state, and our biology prefers it.

Okay, so to get to joy, we need a regulated nervous system. What does an actual regulated nervous system look like compared to maybe just, you know, I'm calm. Like right now I'm calm. But does that mean my nervous system's regulated because I'm calm?

Yeah, actually, it could be the opposite. So calm. So calm and regulated are not the same. Great question. You could be calm and dissociated. You could be calm and checked out. You could be calm and shut down. Right. A regulated nervous system is no different than what. What does it mean to be, like, a highly efficient athlete? Okay, so if you think about best example, I'm a coach. I'm going to use a sports analogy. It's going to happen. Okay, so Tom Brady is the best example. Okay. 45 was. He was 45 when he left the NFL. Okay. He trained his body to take a hit without being taken out. He could get hit and not get injured. A regulated nervous system can take a hit without being taken out. You can experience grief, you can experience disappointment, you can experience upset and not be taken out. You can experience the highs and the lows and not be taken out. So you're able to come back into some type of homeostasis. And so a regulated nervous system is a nervous system that can tolerate and experience the wide range of human emotion and not get taken out, not get taken off purpose, not get taken off mission. So I think a lot of times we think a regular nervous system is numb or it's not feeling it, or it's calmness where it's actually. No, I can actually feel anxiety and be okay. I can feel depression and be okay. I can feel grief and be okay, because I know I can come back. That's what a regulated nervous system is. And it's really about fitness, except for this is emotional fitness versus physical fitness.

So really, what you're describing and the way we would think about it is robustness and resilience. And robustness is basically having some part of yourself that's strong enough to take an unexpected challenge and actually be minimally impacted by it. And resilience is the ability to meet an unexpected challenge, to be impacted by it, but to come back from it, yes, as strong or even stronger in an antifragile sense, even stronger than you were before. One of the things that we can measure here in the office actually, is how strong somebody's nervous system is. We hook them up to a little device for five minutes, and we can actually see how much power do they have in the vagus nerve, which is an indicator of how much power and resilience they have in the nervous system, not only to regulate internal organ function, but also to manage emotional and stress function, if you will. And one of the interesting things, and I'll just ring in the longevity piece of this, is there were a recent trial published that showed that regenerative therapies like stem cells and peptides and things like that work better in somebody that has more parasympathetic nervous system tone and has a higher level of parasympathetic nervous system control. Because when you. When you do have sympathetic nervous system dominance, it's putting your organs under a lot of stress, and it's increasing inflammation. It's increasing. So now you're trying to regenerate in a environment that's trying to tear you down, right? It's like people are trying to tear down the house where you're trying to build it. So that's. That's interesting in and of itself. I think. I think training the parasympathetic nervous system becomes super important. And Madison alluded to the stellate ganglion injection. There's a. There's a company out there called Risona that has a little pendant that hangs down in front of your heart that actually will put signals into your parasympathetic, into your vagus nerve and actually strengthen parasympathetic nervous system tone. And then there's a device called braintap, right. Which is basically binaural beats in your each ear and photobiomodulation. And if you use that on a regular basis, we see people dramatically increase the power in their vagus nerve. Interestingly enough, doing cardiovascular exercise is another. Like an athlete, like a marathoner, has a low heart rate because they've got a very strong parasympathetic nervous system. Well, if you're doing cardio, as opposed to resistance training, resistance training is important and good, but it's cardio that's really going to build that power. So these are ways that if you're listening to this and you want to get started, it's like, oh, well, I could, I could pick up a brain tap. I could start doing more cardio. I could maybe go, you know, buy something that would actually stimulate my vagus nerve to get stronger. And I think it's one of those things that feeds off itself. You know, when you start to feel it a little bit, you start to feel it a little bit more. It's like learning to meditate. Right. Initially, you keep falling off the bike because it's like, I don't know, I'm thinking about stuff. But then you get a little bit of that glide. It's like, oh, okay, there it is. Everything is calm and everything, I'm connected. And then you get more of that. It reinforces itself. So I think all those things can be helpful here.

Yeah, I love that so much. I want to say one more thing. I'm sorry, just on this topic, just around nervous system regulation, and I'm going to pick up what Dr. Latin just said. So I love the idea of being able to sort of like make peptides or whatever work better because you're in parasympathetic. I think that's so awesome. So let's riff on that for a second. People use this term nervous system regulation, but why are we. Why are you regulating. So, for example, if you're regulating our nervous system, that's in a toxic relationship and you're using nervous system regulation tools to tolerate a toxic relationship better. That's a bad thing. You should. We won't want to do that. Right? We want to regulate the grief of leaving a toxic relationship. We don't want to regulate staying in it. Right. We want to regulate the fear of going for the goal, not the regret of not going for it. And so it's also, why are you regulating it? What's the purpose of your regulation? If you're regulating to cope with avoidance, that's a bad strategy. We want to regulate going for it. Leaving grief, expansion, joy, movement forward, not, hey, let me get all these tools so I can stay in this bad marriage longer. Does that make sense?

It's a perfect comment. I think it makes a ton of sense, really. It's basically using the power that you have to optimize your life as opposed to tolerate an existence.

Right.

So, yeah, I think that's super important. I think on the joy front, too, I think that that can sort of really function as a North Star in that. In that scenario. Right. So for me, on some. Actually, I will say in some deep, meditative, psychedelic, assisted moments, I got directly in touch with consciousness and it was pure love. It's just pure love. And when you have that feeling of pure love, then the question was, well, why pure love? And it's like, well, what does love love to do? It loves to create. We have this unfolding multiverse all around us, right? It's love, Loves to create. And what is the. What's the feedback loop on creation for love? It's joy. So I realized being part of this universe from a loving place to create joy is really my purpose here. And if you. If you identify your underlying purpose of why you're here, then it becomes a North Star for you. It's like, oh, well, if I'm not feeling joy, then I'm not in my. I'm not aligned with why I'm really here. Right. So I think that's an important thing for people to understand too. Yeah. I think there's one other thing about what you were talking about, leaving a bad relationship or whatever, is that for a lot of people, we find that safety is the big issue. Right. It's really. A lot of this boils down to safety. Will I be financially safe? Will I be emotionally safe? Will my kids be safe? You know, whatever we're going to do. And so it's a really interesting thing because I've had the realization that nothing external to us can ever make us feel safe. All of it can be taken away. I don't care how much money you have, I don't care where you live, I don't care about any of that. All of it can be gone. And so then it becomes an inside question, right? How do I give myself not only unconditional love. But how do I give myself safety? And when you feel truly safe, when you feel truly safe and you have a strong, resilient, powerful, parasympathetic nervous system, now you're actually able to walk into every situation to receive and to final reception of loving energy into the room. It's a really phenomenal way to live, and it's really different than I live for so many years of my life, but it's a phenomenal way to live. So this is where you want to go, but it's, it's important to have a clear idea of where you want to go. And then, then you can get there. Then you start asking the right questions.

Right.

So, yeah, so well said.

Yes.

I want to circle back just for a second, because what I want to make sure we're clear about, especially for listeners, is, is when you're referring to regulation of the nervous system. And then, and you said it's being able to handle those hits without getting thrown, without getting taken out. Okay, So I want you to maybe explain a little bit more what you mean by taken out. Because if I lose a loved one and I'm sad for several days or several weeks or even several months, does that mean I've been taken out? Or is that just a part of the grieving, mourning process? Does that mean I'm dysregulated because I'm feeling those human emotions and now I have to reregulate? Or is that. No, I felt the emotion and I came back from it. So what do we mean exactly by that?

Yeah, so it's a great question. So, so first of all, just to go back to Tom Brady for a second, right? Imagine Tom training or any athlete training, right? And certainly in football, okay, I want to train to play, but nobody can tackle me. Like, you can't. That you can't do that, right?

That's.

Tackles come with the game, right? So, like, you're going to metaphorically be tackled by a loved one, passing or something, ending to Dr. Glad point, everything will be taken away at some point, Right. I think love in general, to love someone is such a courageous thing because that love will end at some point no matter what. Just the way life works, right? So when we talk about regulation, dysregulation and reregulation, are we talking acutely or chronically? So, for example, again, back to working out, right? The way you build muscle is you go into a catabolic state, you train it, you wear it down, you create micro trauma. But then there's an anabolic repair process of recovery with proper nutrition and rest, where you get stronger. Right. That would be acute dysregulation and reregulation. Completely different than I went in and I did a squat and I tore something and now I'm out for a year and I have to go through a rehab process. Right. So it's what degree of injury is caused in your system by certain things. So if a loved one passes, should you feel grief? Absolutely. But should it cause you to not care about life and not achieve your goals and withdraw from relationships and just, you know, netflix by yourself and eat food and go into this tunnel? Like, probably not. Right. So like, there's a spectrum of normal human emotion that we want to be able to handle. And if something really intense happens, can I reregulate in the moment, but also over time? Right. Because yes, you know, many traditions will sit shiver. There'll be an honoring process of a grief process. And grief is a really hard emotion to deal with. But if it takes you out, if you stop doing the things that you love, that's what we're talking about is it's like, yes, but these are these. We don't want to anesthetize ourselves from feeling because at the end of the day, it's just emotions that we're talking about here. Right. So can I experience something and come back? And how long have I been out? So the measure is frequency, intensity, duration. How frequently does it happen, how intense is it, and how long does it last? So if those markers are going down, good for negative experiences. And then conversely, we want frequency, intensity, and duration of positive experiences to increase. So if your frequency, intensity and duration is making your negative emotion, is making you not able to live your life, causing suicidal ideation, making you withdraw from relationships, causing you to gain weight, whatever it might be, and now we have a problem. Does that make sense? So it's chronic versus acute.

Yeah, I think that's really helpful distinction.

Yeah, I think that's a great answer. I also think that in losing a loved one, and I've lost both my parents and a sister, what's interesting is that when you have a. Let's call it a resilient or robust nervous system, you're actually able to allow yourself to feel profoundly, deeply. You can go really deep. You can remember all the sweet moments, you can remember all the good things. You can be so grateful for the love they gave you and the love you shared together. Right. You can go so deep on that with such emotional depth because you also, on the backside, have the confidence that even though they left that you're not alone and that you're still safe. And so when you have this sense of safety, this internal sense of safety and nervous system robustness, it's not that you need to mitigate your feelings. You're not impacted to where you curl up in a ball, but you're also not trying to minimize your feelings. You're actually, as an honoring to them, almost just go deep into those emotions, knowing that you're. It's safe to do that and that you're going to come back out of it. So it enables you, quite honestly, to I think, lead a richer life. You can experience more than most people can because they avoid it, because they're afraid of it. But you don't have to be afraid of it. You can step into the depths of love and sadness and joy and all of these things. It's a really. Makes for a very rich fabric of life.

That's right. There seems to be a correlation, Autumn, between there's two different types of pain in the body. Well, more than two, but make it simple. There's physical pain that you get from the physical body and there's emotional pain.

Right.

And there's some. There's. This isn't always true, and this is not research. This is my observation. There seems to be something about people who are really good with emotional pain have a harder time tolerating physical pain. And people have a really easy time tolerating physical pain have a harder time with emotional pain. Right. It's kind of interesting, but if you think about like pushing through the next set on a squat, right. Or, you know, Turkish get up or pushing through on like a race or, you know, at a. At a high hard workout. It's the same concept, but just with emotional pain. And so it's also, what is your relationship to pain? And can you tolerate physical discomfort so that you can get physical fitness? And can you tolerate emotional discomfort so that you can get emotional fitness also is a way to think about it.

Yeah. I tell people that all the time in my workouts. I'm like, we're training for life. You prove to yourself that you can handle the discomfort here so that when life throws you discomfort mentally, you're strong enough. Like, you push through in the workout because you're building mental strength and fortitude to do that in life.

That's exactly right.

I think it's a great pairing combination.

Like create analogy. Yeah.

So I would say, I guess I have one more question. Like, as we're wrapping up, we've talked about a lot of things, like Madison, what would be your advice to somebody? Just like, what is the first step someone would take to try to move from, like, their survival to their thriving?

Yeah, it's a great question. So in my observation and the research I've done, the literature I've read, the fastest way to regulate the nervous system towards something like that is to come out of isolation in the thing that you're struggling with. You could be surrounded by people and be not alone, but you're alone with what you're holding. Right. And so finding one person, it could be a coach, a therapist, a doctor, a friend, a trusted person, someone trusted that you could actually tell what you're struggling to with and they can be with you in that shared context. That's called CO regulation. Fastest way to regulate the nervous system. There's certain people, I just think of them, I feel calm. They walk into the room, I feel calm, they even touch me. There's no breath work. I didn't do anything yet. Just seeing them calms me down.

Right.

Other people, I look at them, I get super stressed. Just the thought of when we're seeing them. Right. So I think not just the idea of loneliness, the loneliness epidemic, it's not just about people being around you. It's about are you known? And if you're struggling with something, is there a person, one person that you can share something with that you're holding by yourself? Even if you're surrounded by a thousand people, Right. You're still alone in that experience. I think the first thing to do is to step into some CO regulation around that so you can have a shared context so you're not holding something by yourself. That'd be the first thing I would do.

Yeah, I think that's. I think that's right. I think, you know, when I think about what's what, a great relationship is right. To me, it's to know and be known and to love and be loved. And if you can find someone that, that you can. And that takes being vulnerable, quite honestly. So when you bring this forward, it's going to feel like a courageous conversation. It's like, I'm not sure if you're ready to hear this, but if you're willing to mass then or Autumn, I've got something to share. And if you say yes and it's like you're going to get to know me better because I'm going to be vulnerable. So you have to realize that to make progress, you're going to need to make yourself Vulnerable and that's going to feel a little scary. And you may try with one person and then not the right person, but if you, if you realize that you will find the right person and then you can start to build together, that's, that's a really cool thing. And even that you learn resilience and you learn, you know, basically how to move forward. So. Yeah, that's right.

This has been fascinating for me, filled with so much information. It's given me a lot to think about. So I'm sure it's given the listeners quite a bit to think about as well. Madison, do you have any final thoughts for us?

I'm just, first of all grateful to be here and just also, I just, I'm so hopeful about the future because everything that, you know, Glad longevity is doing in terms of understanding genetics, understanding gut microbiome, understanding like all the biological mechanisms and getting so precise on the data, it's like so amazing what can happen. And I'm filled with so much hope. And you pair that with, you know, the biological understanding of how to regulate the nervous system, the value of purpose and organizing principle to guide towards understanding that we're wired for joy. The combination of all that, to me gives me so much hope for the future. And, you know, the world's becoming more trauma aware, but I think that, you know, surviving trauma and identifying that and working through that is a hero's or heroine's quest. It's a big deal to get there and it's not the end. There's more, there's more joy, there's more abundance and there's more availability of all the good stuff possible now more than ever. And so I just, I feel more excited about the future than I ever have. As all of these things are sort of coming together, we're starting to understand how we work and what we need. So that's, that's where I am in all this.

Yeah, I would, I would echo that. And I think that if you're listening to this, you should realize that each of us is on a hero's journey to reclaim our birthright, to live unencumbered. Right. Unencumbered by things that have happened and the stories we've told ourselves. And to live into a place of love, creating joy. And the interesting thing is that when you start to move into that space, you attract it to you. You'll find other people and you will have more love in your life. So I think, you know what I tell clients here, and I had a client, I was a little late to this podcast, because we were finishing up with a client, was, you know, I tell them that all of life comes down to one thing, right? And, you know, in longevity, we say it's never about one thing, right? It's going to be a whole bunch of things that are going to get you there. But in life, I think it really does just come down to one thing, and that's optimizing your nervous system. You know, how you think, what you feel, what you believe, what you think is possible, what you believe about the past, the stories you tell yourself, how you move through space. And so I really, really appreciate you being on the show, Masten, because I think it's. It's just, it's the pinnacle of really, what we do is to optimize the nervous system. Good to see you again, Autumn. Thanks for all your great questions.

Thank you both for letting me be a part of this conversation. I really appreciate it. It's been so insightful. Mastin where can people follow you, Learn more about your coaching? I know you said you might have some events coming up for us. Where can they stay informed?

Sure. Just Mastin Kip M A S T I n K I P P on all the things. So just wherever you are, Instagram, TikTok websites, all the. All the places, you know, whatever. All the places. Just Mast and Kit.

Yeah, he's omnipresent. Okay.

Yes.

Moved in a deity state. Yeah.

Good.

Thank you guys.

Great to see you guys. Thanks so much.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. If you would like more information on what we've discussed or other topics, please reference the show notes or go to gladdenlongevitypodcast.com youm can also find us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter by searching Gladden Longevity if you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to get future episodes delivered to you and share our podcast or this episode with someone in your life that you may find benefit. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another exciting episode. The Gladden Longevity Podcast is brought provided for informational purposes only. IT does not constitute medical advice. This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding the medical condition. The use of any information and materials linked to this podcast is at the listener's own risk.