Dr. Tabatha Barber explains how childhood trauma keeps your stress system stuck in overdrive. Chronic stress floods your body with cortisol, leaving you mentally wired but physically exhausted because your baseline has reset higher.
Can you please help our viewers understand, like, what is flight— fight or flight? And this idea of like, I'm wired but tired, like I want to rest but my mind won't shut off, but physically I don't want to get out of bed because I'm exhausted. Like, what is going on in our bodies?
So a lot of times, and I see this specifically and I experience this myself, is when you grow up And you are managing the best that you can. You know, I my dad was in the military. My mom stayed home with us. We moved, I think, seventeen times before I was in high school. That is a lot of meeting people, losing people, meeting people, losing people, and a lot of trauma that I just took on and lived with. Our bodies need cortisol. God gave us this amazing hormone to help us if we get scared and we see a bear and we need to run, or Um, if we're in a scary situation or we feel stressed, and our body can release extra cortisol for us to help function, think more clearly, and get ourselves into a healthier place. The problem is, if you grow up with it— with a childhood, or you're parenting through hard times for a very extended amount of time, your body is constantly producing too much cortisol, and that becomes your new normal.
