Why Your Body Can't Detox & How to Fix It, with Alex Howard

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How does having a maladaptive stress response impact the body's ability to detox? What can you draw the line there? What happens?

Yeah, there's a, there's a lot of different ways of, of looking at it. I think one of the most interesting ways is Dr. Robert Navier's work on cell danger response, which, so our mitochondria, which are effectively the powerhouses of our cells, many people will be familiar with the mitochondria having the responsibility for making energy, but they have a second purpose and that second purpose is danger signaling. And so when there is a physiological or a psycho emotional or some kind of danger or threat to our system, our mitochondria, rather than making energy like the raw ingredients of what our body needs to heal, to detox, to function, to, to do all the things that we need to do day to day, that energy production becomes deprioritized. So our body can focus on the danger signaling that is to be able to spread the message of the maladaptive stress response within and between ourselves. And so not only does this have a big impact in terms of physical energy, and it's one of the things we see a lot with fatigue related conditions that when we're in a maladaptive stress response, the body's ability to make energy is impacted, but also then all of the downstream things that happen from making energy. So for example, when we're sequencing intervention, for example, with fatigue conditions. So let's say that someone has a mycotoxins issue and we want to do to a protocol which is going to help support the body in terms of detoxing. To be able to do that, the system has to be strong enough in the first place. And so we often will have patients that come to us that will say, I've tried doing protocols and I can't do them. Every time that I start a protocol like this, I feel so incredibly unwell. And it's not like I just need to ride the feeling unwell and then I start to feel better. I just feel horrendous until I stop the intervention. And then I feel no benefit from having been through weeks or months of feeling horrendous. And so in that instance, we're looking at a couple of things. One, do we need to build more capacity and more resilience in the body to be able to do the protocol in the first place? The second thing that we're often looking at, going back to your question also around the maladaptive stress response, that one way to think about it is that if you imagine so back in, I think it was 2007, there were some bombings on the London Underground. And prior to that people would, often people would leave like their gym bag on the tube or London Underground and people go, someone's left their gym bag or whatever. And then there was a massively heightened awareness of the risk of a bomb. And so someone would leave a complete unsentia. Leave a bag on the underground and the whole network would shut down. And it was, and this, this happened many, many times that there was a very heightened danger response to threat because of, of, of, of what had happened. Our immune system responds in, in the same way, it becomes hypersensitive. So when our nervous system is significantly jacked up, or put it in the term we're using in the maladaptive stress response, we start to react to things as being a threat or things as being a danger when they're not. And that can be things like chemicals, foods and environmental things and so on. But it can also be the very interventions that we're using to support healing because our system is seeing them as a threat when they may not actually be. And so this is where we often find by working to regulate the system and to calm down that maladaptive stress response, not only is the body's capacity for self healing improved, but also people's tolerance of intervention goes up significantly as well.

So can we talk about how you do that with people? What I'm hearing is you want to shut down the danger response that people have so that they can go into a more functional response. But how do you get from A to Z?

Yeah, yeah. So the first thing is you got to recognize what's happening. And I think one of the things that's tricky is that we tend to normalize to whatever becomes our normal. Right. And so many, many times over the years, I remember sitting with patients and their nervous system was so wired that I was having to work hard to regulate my own system in their presence because they were so activated. You know, they'd be sort of swinging in the chair, they'd be so activated. And I would talk about what we've somewhat, we've just been talking about and they would say it makes sense theoretically, but that's not true for me because they were so normalized to being in the state they were in, they weren't even recognizing that it was happening. And so in some ways just having the awareness, like if you can see it, you don't have to be it. Like the very awareness that. Hang on, I can See that my system is wired and active and overactivated. That in of itself gives a moment of choice of, well, maybe I then need to do something different.

So bringing distinction to even the state someone is in.

Yeah. So to be able to recognize that the system is dysregulated, that in of itself is the first step to being able to do something to change it. Because otherwise, what are we changing? So the framework that I use is the acronym Reset. So the first is to recognize, and we do exercises around that, for example, getting people to identify the difference between being in a stress state, in a healing state. How do they feel different at different points in the day, where is their system, what are the triggers, what's their baseline in a sense, what's the homeostatic balance of their nervous system? What's the homeostasis that it's settled at? And by definition of it being a maladaptive stress response, that homeostasis has moved to an unhealthy place. So then the second part, the E of reset, is to examine how and why is this happening? So what are the triggers? And that may be historical emotional trauma. It may be what's happening right now. Often it can be. Sometimes people come in with a predisposition towards anxiety. For other people, the biggest source of their anxiety is their symptoms and their body and what's happening and the kind of medically unexplained nature of it. It can also be that we've got, we've learned patterns around defining ourselves by. But like I talked about in my story, what we do, what we achieve, that we're only valuable if we're helping and giving to others, or that our safety in the world comes from controlling ourselves and controlling the environment. Or if we don't do things perfectly right, then we'll be rejected. There's all kinds of patterns that, that can be there. So we need to recognize we're in a dysregulated state. We need to be able to examine like what are the ingredients of that, what's happening which is driving that we then need to stop, which is, which is the S of reset. We need to break the cycle of the patterns that we're in. And for me, there are two primary ingredients to doing this. The first is meditation, mindfulness, yoga, qigong, tai chi, practices that will help us actively learn to self regulate our nervous system. And for some people, those practices are very helpful very quickly. For other people they can be really tricky. And there can be sometimes trauma elements that need to be addressed to them, make those Practices easier. And other times we've just really got to put the work into. But if there's a lot of momentum towards being dysregulated, it can take a fair bit of work to start to train the system into a different place. But the second piece, which is particularly important is meditation. Practices will help calm things down. But as soon as we stop practicing, they start to reactivate again. So we need to have tools and strategies to be able to catch those patterns, to be able to stop them, and to actively retrain the habits and the behaviors in. In our nervous system. And so there are various ways of doing that, and we certainly have. Have ways that we find very helpful. Then the. The fourth step, or the second e of. Of reset is we have to deal with our. The emotions. And one of the primary reasons why we can become maladaptive in our stress response in the first place is there's just like. There can be a physical overload. We talked about loads on the bow. There can be an emotional overload, and that can be single events, it can be multiple events, it can be big events, it can be small events. But in a sense, we have a whole load of unprocessed emotional history. It's almost like a big black sack of stuff that we're kind of lugging around. And every so often, it kind of explodes out. And because that's so overloading in our body, we escape into our mind to get away from those feelings. So one of the things that's often fueling the overthinking and the dysregulated nature of a maladaptive stress response is a way of moving away from those emotions and feelings that haven't been processed. And so learning to metabolize, to process, to digest, to heal that underlying trauma is often very important in terms of getting a lasting change in the nervous system. Otherwise, we're constantly having to work to rebalance it. But when we do that deeper work, what we find is that there's a new homeostasis that effectively then takes form. Then the final step is we have to transform our relationship with ourself and our relationship with the world. And often part of the glue that holds together all of these old patterns is a kind of inner critic, constant judging, beating up of ourselves. And so as we become more in contact with our feelings, often we're a little bit more vulnerable and sensitive in a good way. And so we need to make sure that we get space from that, but also to learn to meet our own kind of core emotional needs for ourselves. So there's a kind of sequencing, ultimately, of awareness, having strategies to break the cognitive elements, working with the emotional elements, and then figuring out what it means to live our life from that new place.

This is fascinating, Alex, because if you think about it, most of what you're talking about at some level is accessible to everyone, which I believe goes back to your passion about making it accessible to everyone. Because you can do this work without thousands of dollars of therapy, and you can get tai chi online, and you can get qigong. There's really you can do almost all of this pretty easily. Easy might not be the right word, but it's accessible. And so that's what's really striking to me. And then the other part to this is nowhere in this are you reliant upon a diagnosis. La.