Restore Your Immune System Through Healing Stress and Trauma | Dr. Sara Gottfried

The parasympathetic nervous system— stay and play, rest and digest— that's where all the healing happens.

Do you find yourself constantly battling fatigue or brain fog, pain or other strange symptoms that never seem to go away?

In women, high cortisol shrinks the brain and affects memory, and that happens not in old age, but in middle age.

Does that mean that there's a difference between how men and women respond to trauma?

Women have more trauma, especially sexual trauma, sexual violence, and it leads to greater risk of about 45 different chronic diseases, including autoimmune disease.

You could be one of the many people who are suffering and struggling from an undiagnosed autoimmune disease.

About 80% of people with autoimmunity have trauma as a trigger.

Many live for years with debilitating issues written off by doctors, unaware that their own immune system is really the culprit.

What we know when it comes to women and trauma is that women experience more.

So tune in to this episode and you will discover surprising signs of how your body might be attacking itself and what you can do.

Things like an elimination diet, which is free, can have such a huge impact on reducing inflammation and also getting that gut barrier to be back in integrity.

Are there certain foods that are kind of your go-to?

Probably the most Anti-inflammatory foods that I consume are wild game.

What about stress?

We all need stress. We need stress to be productive. We need stress to motivate us and to go after that mission and vision that we have for our life. It's just a huge part of living life fully.

We can be the pilot of our bodies. We don't have to be the passengers.

If you've got too much stress, it's probably affecting your pine network.

Pine stands for Welcome back, Kwik Brains. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Autoimmune diseases are extremely common, more than most people realize, affecting an estimated 24 million Americans alone. Yet conventional medicine often struggles to properly diagnose, much less treat autoimmune diseases. Many people suffer from debilitating symptoms like fatigue and brain fog and pain, unexpected weight changes without realizing their immune system is the underlying culprit. According to Dr. Sarah Gottfried, the missing link might be trauma, both physical and emotional, which can trigger a vicious cycle of immune dysregulation. Her recent book for you to all to reference, I highly recommend it, is The Autoimmune Cure: Healing the Trauma and Other Triggers That Have Turned Your Body Against You. Welcome to the show, Dr. Gottfried.

Thank you so much, Jim. Appreciate the intro. Lovely.

Yeah. I could take the whole show and talk about your CV, but I know our audience, it's been requested. We have a private group. Many of those listening, we have a couple hundred thousand people there, over 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube. And thank you everybody who subscribed there. This comes up a lot, this question about our immune system and autoimmune challenges. And so let's start with your book subtitle. It mentions healing trauma as a key component of addressing autoimmune diseases. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit on the connection between psychological trauma or any form of trauma and the development of autoimmune conditions.

What we know is that about 80% of people with autoimmunity have trauma as a trigger. So if we take a step back, the way I think of it, I'm a root cause physician. I think in terms of 3 different factors that are required to develop autoimmunity, and those are genetic predisposition, leaky gut, increased intestinal permeability, and then a trigger. And that trigger can be one of various things. It could be adverse childhood experiences.

Hmm.

It could be Physical trauma. It could be emotional trauma, toxic stress. It could be hormonal transition like perimenopause or being postpartum or an infection. I think a lot of us post-pandemic are noticing an exponential rise in autoimmunity. And one of the things that I think is important to realize as we look at the root causes of autoimmunity is that There's really a spectrum here, Jim, from a state of health, which I really define in terms of homeostasis, to autoimmune disease. But there's a vast middle ground in between where people are starting to develop inflammation and maybe attacking their normal tissues. And that can go on for 7 to 14 years before you actually get a diagnosis.

So your approach, maybe we can unpack this a little bit, and I encourage everyone to get a copy of the book because it goes into way more detail. So it includes healing trauma to, let's say, combat autoimmune diseases. What are some of the effective strategies or therapies that you recommend for individuals who are listening? Maybe it's for themselves or a family member or teammate to maybe start addressing their trauma towards a better physical and cognitive health?

The first step is measurement. So I, you know, this is where my bioengineering side definitely comes out because I really believe that what you measure improves. I was talking to my friend Mark Hyman recently. He's launched this laboratory test called Function Health, and he's found that even among the healthy people that have signed up to get blood work with him, He's had 100,000 people now. About 30% of them have positive antibodies against their own tissues. 30%.

Wow.

So it's a really common issue. And when you look at the different approaches that are available, conventional medicine tends to try to take symptoms and put them into a particular constellation. And if you don't fit the constellation, sometimes you can suffer with symptoms that can go on for years. And that includes brain fog, it includes mysterious inflammation, it can include pain, joint pain, weakness. So really vague symptoms. In terms of root cause, what I like to do is to assess these measurements, do kind of a basic panel of blood work to look for inflammation. And if you have it, like I did when I tested myself 5 years ago, I had positive antinuclear antibodies. If you have it, then you want to start first with food because that's such a primary driver of inflammation in the body and it can lead to loss of barrier integrity, which can certainly affect the brain and can certainly affect your ability to learn. And then we want to address leaky gut. So things like an elimination diet, which is free, can have such a huge impact on reducing inflammation and also getting that gut barrier to be back in integrity. And then there's immune modulators, things like vitamin D, things like curcumin, Low-dose naltrexone, which is available by prescription. There's so many things that can help you with modulating your immune system. And then the last I would say is healing states of consciousness. And that's where the trauma work becomes more important. I'm a big fan of somatic work. So things like somatic experiencing or the neuro-emotional technique or Hakomi, which is a form of therapy that I've trained in that I find to be very effective.

We'll put links to some of these resources in the show notes as we often do, as well as A link to your book. So everyone listening, you can go over to jimkwik.com/notes for that. So in your research, you have found that autoimmune diseases can impact our cognitive function and our brain performance. Let's unpack some of these things that you mentioned that could help people. And again, this conversation is not meant to treat or diagnose, you know, any health challenge. Obviously talk to a health practitioner, be responsible and use common sense for that. You mentioned foods. Are there certain foods that are kind of your go-to with, with clients and patients or your recommendations?

Well, there's certain foods that tend to be inflammatory, and they can trigger the immune system. And those are things like gluten, dairy, nightshades, even foods that you can think of as being relatively healthy, like nuts and seeds. If you're set up so that your immune system is kind of on alert and you've got this civil war that's starting in your body, things like nuts and seeds can actually trigger increased inflammation. So what I think is important here when we think about inflammation is how it can show up in so many different ways. And it's also somewhat vague. It can flow, fly below the radar, but a lot of people experience inflammation as brain fog. They're just not as quick as they used to be. They have trouble with their processing speed, all these things that I know you help with so much. And, you know, what I think we need to do is we need some of those techniques and tools to deal with the consequences of inflammation, but we also want to look upstream and see how can we turn down the dial on inflammation.

And so you mentioned some that might be stimulating in that area. Are there any safe foods that you find would be nourishing? On the other side, I know with nightshades and nuts, some people could have an adverse reaction to certain foods, obviously gluten and dairy, or some kind of allergy that could create an inflammation response. Are there certain foods that in general, and I know like some people can't digest kale or, you know, so you can't make any absolutes and not everything's for everybody and everyone's a little bio-individual, but is there— certain foods that you kind of, you feel like would be safe or nourishing in this area?

Yeah, I love that you used nourishing. So I think in terms of the foods that are the most nourishing, that would be vegetables. So vegetables, you know, if you get 100 nutritionists and you ask them about, okay, what are the safe foods, vegetables would definitely win the prize. We know that when it comes to the microbiome and the gut-brain axis that we want To get about 25 to 35 different species of vegetables every week. So vegetables, I think, are critical. And for people on an elimination diet who've got autoimmunity, you want to cut out those vegetables that are nightshades. So that includes eggplant, peppers, tomatoes are a fruit, but tomatoes are also a nightshade. So I would say primarily vegetables, also lean protein. And we can talk a bit about that. I'm from Alaska. I really find that probably the most anti-inflammatory foods that I consume are wild game. And they're increasingly available. And I think it's just an incredibly nourishing way to eat.

Fantastic. Yeah, I think, I mean, certainly what we eat matters, especially for our gray matter. What about stress? It's a significant factor in cognitive, you know, compromising our cognitive performance. So in Autoimmune Cure, do you address how stress management can influence these autoimmune diseases and by extension, you know, our brain health?

The way I like to think of it is that we all need stress. We need stress to be productive. We need stress to motivate us into You know, go after that mission and vision that we have for our life. It's just a huge part of living life fully. And yet some of us kind of teeter right on that edge toward toxic stress, high perceived stress. And I see this especially in my clients. So I work with all different types of people, mostly executives and professional athletes, but also perimenopausal women who are just in a state of dysregulation. When it comes to their ecosystem and how they're interacting with stress. And there's ways you can measure that. Of course, when people are in a state of eustress, kind of a healthy amount of stress, cortisol is meant to be kind of in this Goldilocks position, not too high, not too low. So right kind of in the middle where you feel productive and you feel kind of brimming with energy when you wake up in the morning, your mind is functioning well. But for those of us, and I'm one of them, who have high cortisol, like it's more than what your body needs and your adrenals are cranking out too much cortisol, it can really have adverse effects. So when it comes to the brain, we know in women, high cortisol shrinks the brain and affects memory. And that happens not in old age, but in middle age. So this was established in the Framingham cohort, looking at women between the ages of 40 and 65. So toxic stress has a number of different effects. That's a brain effect. It also— high cortisol is a biomarker of depression, and it's even used by psychiatrists as a suicide marker.

Hmm.

But high stress also Increases corticotropin-releasing hormone, and that pokes holes directly into the gut and affects the gut-brain axis and increases inflammation since 70% of your immune system is in your gut. So there's a lot of different effects from toxic stress. The way I think of it, Jim, is that if you've got too much stress, it's probably affecting your pine network. PINE. So PINE stands for your psychology. That's the P. I stands for your immune system triggering inflammation. N stands for your nervous system causing dysregulation and that feeling of maybe not being safe when you are safe. And then the E of PINE is your endocrine system. And that's where the cortisol, for example, gets affected. But other hormones too, including insulin, testosterone, estradiol, progesterone, all of those can be affected by toxic stress.

Our community loves acronyms. So PINE is definitely, it's going to be very sticky. We use a lot of mnemonics to help people kind of shortcut that. So when we're going back to the stress that can have these adverse effects, maybe, you know, create the adrenaline, the cortisol, kind of It could shrink, shrink our brain. Do you have some go-to personally mechanisms or methods or practices, activities to be able to mitigate or cope with that stress? What are, what are your favorites?

Well, I really encourage all of my clients that I work with to come up with an à la carte menu of what works the best for them.

Sure, sure.

So I'll give you, I'll give you my menu.

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So I started practicing yoga and meditation with my great-grandmother when I was 5. I was doing transcendental meditation when I was 17. I went off to college. So I have been working with mindfulness and, you know, these ways of developing Your witness self for decades. But I would also say that they weren't quite enough for me. And I had this occurrence right along when I did a blood test that showed positive antinuclear antibodies. I had a problem in one of my family relationships. And I realized, okay, this This estrangement that I experienced with this family member was related to trauma. And there was a way that many of these practices like yoga and meditation were not enough to help me resolve that trauma. So this is a critical point because, you know, those things are important in terms of regulating your nervous system, Helping you with hormonal balance, maybe helping you with your immune system. But I realized I needed to resolve my trauma to heal this particular relationship. And it got me to look at the literature on what we do for trauma. And the gold standard, Jim, is abysmal. The gold standard right now for post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a more extreme version of You know, the result of trauma, but it's something I see in my patients, especially partial PTSD or what's known as subthreshold PTSD. The gold standard is talk therapy that may or may not be trauma-informed together, potentially with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. And there's 3 that are FDA approved. And yet the efficacy, Jim, of those helping to resolve your symptoms of PTSD are somewhere around 30%. So we've got to come up with some better methods for how to, how to resolve trauma, especially with how it affects our daily functioning, you know, not just physiologically, but also relationally.

That makes sense. You know, my mind, to reduce stress, it's nature walks or it's, you know, meditation. That's kind of a must for me. Done a series of EMDR. I had a traumatic brain injury when I was a child and some additional trauma in other areas. But between that and tapping, EFT, been very, very useful for me. You mentioned hormones and you've written several books on hormones and how they affect our bodies, especially in women. And in your book, it actually says that I think 4 out of 5 people who have autoimmune diseases Are women? And is— does that mean that there's a difference between how men and women respond to trauma? And what can we learn from this as it comes towards healing our bodies?

Well, I certainly take care of a lot of men who've got autoimmune disease. So even my professional athletes, I've got a few with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is the most common autoimmune disease. So Women are disproportionately affected. I sometimes say that it's a health hazard to be female. What we know when it comes to women and trauma is that women experience more. So in the initial studies that were done looking at, for instance, adverse childhood experiences, also known as ACEs, women have more trauma, especially sexual trauma, sexual violence. Compared to men. And it leads to greater risk of about 45 different chronic diseases, including autoimmune disease. The other difference, sex difference between men and women, is that women go through these massive hormonal shifts that men don't go through. So that includes pregnancy, postpartum, which is a vulnerable time for something called postpartum thyroiditis, where you start to attack your own thyroid tissues. And then perimenopause, a lot of people think of perimenopause and postmenopause as purely hormonal, that you're not making as much estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. But the truth is perimenopause is a huge immune and metabolic change too. So there's these vast hormonal changes that women go through that men don't go through. Men go through andropause, not all but some. And it's a much more subtle shift than the kind of wild fluctuation we see in women.

Hmm.

And then there's differences just in the X chromosome. So men have, uh, in sex chromosomes, an XY, of course. Women have 2 Xs. The X seems to represent more immune regulation and The potential for more immune dysregulation. And then, as you said, to your point, when men and women are exposed to the same trauma, such as a military event gone wrong, women have higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than we see in men. So there's a lot of sex differences. There's probably some gender differences too that we're still trying to understand.

Yeah, we've done a few episodes on The female brain and how a woman's cycle could also affect their physiology. And even on Alzheimer's, that women are twice as likely to experience Alzheimer's than men. I lost my grandmother to Alzheimer's when I was 7. So it's something that we actually donate a lot of proceeds to our book to Alzheimer's research for women. So we're just very passionate about this. We hear a lot about post-traumatic stress. We don't hear a lot about Yes, exactly. Yes, I'm sure some people listening have gone through adversity that they wouldn't wish upon anybody, but they wouldn't honestly change what happened, that experience for themselves, because through it, they found a mission or they found a trait or clarity or strength or something that there was a gift in it. And I know it, I mean, for me, I had migraines every day at the age of 5 because of my brain injury, learning disability. Couldn't read for 3 years. And, you know, eventually through, through a lot of the practices and the tools, I found grace because, you know, those struggles became strengths, you know, over, over time. And I wouldn't change that. And I'm not saying that everyone can necessarily should have that perspective. But yeah, it's, it's interesting. This is why I think this, this topic is so important because a lot of our people in our community, they want to read faster and they want to remember their speeches. But if they're dealing, if their nervous system is locked. You know, it's going to hold you hostage in your, a lot of times metaphorically in your survival brain and keep you away from your creativity or more of your purpose, your creative thinking, your executive functioning, because safety becomes really, really paramount. So for somebody who's looking to mitigate or potentially even prevent autoimmune issues and maintain their kind of like high performance or whatever people call it. Maybe we could summarize the 3 actionable strategies. Obviously, you know, the bonus one is everyone get a copy of the book, right? So The Autoimmune Cure, I'm sure people can get that where books are sold. But are there 3 takeaways you'd like to leave people who are listening?

The 3 takeaways that I would emphasize are number one, measurement. A lot of people think of trauma and toxic stress as something that's not measurable, but it absolutely is. So I think benchmarking yourself, having a sense of, you know, this traumatic experience that you had, it may be that it still lives on in your body. There might be a particular physiological or psychological signature of it that might need to be addressed. And so some of the ways that I measure it include the blood testing that we've talked about. I also use wearables. I use A ring. I look at heart rate variability. I track my sleep. I look at daytime stress. These are some of the ways that you can measure it. And then the second is a food-first philosophy where you're really looking at, am I eating the foods that are more nourishing for my body, my immune system, my endocrine system, my nervous system?

Yeah.

You know, things that help to reduce chronic inflammation. And then the third I would say is healing states of consciousness. And that includes, you know, I told you that I've been doing meditation for many decades, but I started doing holotropic breathwork when I was writing this book. And I found it was so helpful for inducing a healing state of consciousness where I could look at some of the traumatic experiences I've had and be less sort of caught up in the story and look more objectively at what was happening. So healing states of consciousness are pretty broad. There's a lot of different ways to enter healing states of consciousness. But one of the pinnings, the biological underpinnings of a healing state of consciousness is that when you look at the autonomic nervous system and you think about the sympathetic nervous system, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, the parasympathetic nervous system, stay and play, rest and digest, that's where all the healing happens. So we don't want to run around, you know, in our parasympathetic nervous system all the time. We want to be able to fluidly move back and forth. But the healing happens in the parasympathetic, and you can track that. You can track it with heart rate variability. You can track it with, you know, just kind of noticing in a time series what's going on with your inflammation. Are you able to resolve maybe a chronic state of inflammation?

Yeah, you have to be able to measure something in order to be able to manage it. Sarah, I could talk to you for hours. I can— I encourage everybody to get a copy of your book. The Autoimmune Cure. Again, it's, it's healing the trauma and the other triggers that have turned your body against you. Where can people get a copy of the book?

They can get it anywhere books are sold, Amazon, your local independent bookseller.

Fantastic.

Anywhere.

And then, um, how do people stay in touch if they want to go deeper in your, in your work beside your book? Where can they find you?

So the mothership is my website, which is sarahgodfriedmd.com. I hang out a lot on Instagram, so it's a good place to hang out with me. And my handle is @sarahgodfriedmd.

Awesome. So everybody go follow Dr. Gottfried on, on social media, check out her website, absolutely get a copy of the book. And I imagine a lot of people who are listening would want to get a copy for a friend or a family member that, uh, because I think you learn something for 2 reasons. You learn it for how you can benefit, but you also, you learn and share it because of how other people could benefit. And so I think this podcast episode is a very clear reminder that we can be the pilot of our bodies. We don't have to be the passengers, you know, and these little choices that we make really add up and that little by little, you know, when we're following Pine, right? And you're measuring something and then you're monitoring your diet. You can eliminate certain things. You have some kind of mindful practice also. So little things add up to big things and little by little, little becomes a lot. So Dr. Gottfried, thank you so much for being on our show. Everyone, make sure you go to the show notes. We'll put links to all of Sarah's, her previous books, other highlighted talks, her website, social media, and so much more. I encourage everybody, this episode went a little bit longer than our usual shows, so we put the extended version on YouTube. So you could find us there, join 1.5 million subscribers. Look at Dr. Godfrey's YouTube also as well. I had a, it was like a rabbit hole going through some of your content before our interview. So thank you again for your great work.

Thanks, Jim.

All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you subscribe, leave a review, and limitless appreciation. Until our next episode. Bye now.