Jessica Macguire: EPISODE
The Nervous System Reset: BOOK LINK
TRANSCRIPT:
Bridgett: – We’re welcoming Jessica Macguire to the podcast today.
Welcome, Jessica
Jessica: . – Hi Bridgett, thanks so much for having me.
Bridgett:- Well, I know that you have written the book,
The Nervous System Reset: Heal Trauma, Resolve Chronic Pain,
and Regulate Your Emotions with the Power of the Vagus Nerve.
You also have a new Vagus Nerve program workshop coming out.
It’s really been wonderful and helpful
to read your book and find out why things are happening
to us, why conditions that we’re feeling in our body can come out and show
physically in our body. So we’re really thrilled to have you to talk about that
today. I kind of wanted to get started with just about um how maybe anxiety and
non -appearance situations can trigger things that happen to us physically.
Jessica: Yeah it’s a great topic isn’t it because we often hear stress is bad for you or stress
will impact your health but it doesn’t really make sense you know until I think we see
the vagus nerve and when you look at its anatomy or where it’s traveling in our
body, it really makes perfect sense why things like anxiety makes irritable bowel
syndrome worse or people experience it. Or we can really see from the vagus nerves
branch that runs from our brainstem directly to the heart’s pacemaker why some people
develop things like altered heartbeats or even high blood pressure because of stress.
So we really see its impact with things like the gut, with pain and inflammation,
but it can be a number of ways that it can show up for people. And it’s
interesting that when we have these ongoing symptoms and we can’t quite get to the
root cause of the, it’s sometimes it can be because of anxiety and chronic stress
or people who’ve experienced traumatic stress too.
Colleen: I wanted to start with because
obviously the book is called the nervous system reset. So can we talk a little bit
about the nervous system and the vagus nerve? Because I don’t think a lot of people
even know what the vagus nerve is.
Jessica: I know it’s, It’s just coming into our like
common knowledge and it’s really interesting time to be talking about this but when
we talk about the nervous system, we’re really looking at the part that we call our
autonomic nervous system and it’s our inner threat detection system.
So it’s this inbuilt system we all have and It has the role to keep us safe,
like that will be its priority. But the other thing that this system does is that
it actually regulates a lot of our organs and the systems. So we see this overlap,
but it’s even related to how we connect to people. So it even shows up in what
our relationships are like. So when we, what we used to say for this part of our
nervous system was that I was a bit like a car with the gas or the accelerator
and then that was known as the sympathetic branch or the fight or flight and this
is where you know we feel that mobilizing energy coming in which is really what
anxiety is, it’s what anger is, it’s where we might feel our self be nervous And
the break we used to call our parasympathetic or the rest and digest.
And we used to think that it was very simple. And so this break was just calming
us down or helping us recover. And so that branch known as rest and digest was
what was helping us slow, not only our physiology or our emotions back down,
but we would also change how our systems were functioning. But what we now know
more recently has come to light is that we actually have two branches that slow us
down. So one is the branch of the vagus nerve that I mentioned before that runs
from the brain to the heart and that’s the branch that helps us to cope with and
recover from stress, and it brings us into regulation. So we might say we’re in the
state of nervous system regulation, which is a great place to be.
We feel calm, we feel connected with others. We are able to see clearly an acting
line with our values, but it’s where many of our organs and body systems also
function at their best too. But the other break that’s only more recently come to
light, it’s a little bit like pulling on the handbrake. And this is the more
primitive branch of the vagus nerve called the dorsal vagal
us into too much of a slowing down. And so what will happen in the face of highly
stressful events is that we can feel our energy nosed up.
We can feel the collapse in our body. People might call this freeze where they’ve
got this energy but they can’t move. But it’s also known as like a collapse or
shut down where we can’t move, we can’t speak, we can’t take action and in face of
traumatic stress this is the most common response but our society doesn’t understand
- Why that will yet? You know we often hear people say well if they were so,
if they’re having such a hard time why didn’t they leave or why didn’t they say
something. So those three states we can look at as that state in the middle where
the vagus nerve takes us into a regulation and then we have the sympathetic
accelerator or the gas taking us into hyperarousal where there’s too much mobilization
and then that more primitive branch of the vagus nerve taking us into hyperarousal
which is an immobilization where we don’t have enough energy.
Bridgett: Yeah you know you also
talk about like the states of being you’re either too hot it’s almost kind of
was like Goldilocks in the three bears you know too hot and then too cold and then
you’re trying to get in that middle and even while you know I don’t know in my
past I always think too hot too hot let’s cool down, but being too cool can also
be a problem as well. Can you talk about why being too hard? I think you kind of
did and that to explain how being too cold can be a problem as well.
Jessica: I love this question Bridgett because you know we hear so much around we need to
calm down. We need to bring ourselves down and that’s not really the essence of a
healthy nervous system.
Well, women, where we have less of that hot energy in our system naturally compared
to men, men have more of that. We actually tend to get prone to going more into
that too cold state. And I would say, this is particularly true when we label
certain reactions or emotions like anger.
And we might say that anger is part of that hot state or the mobilizing energy.
And yet because so many of us don’t know how to have that capacity for containing
anger, we tend to then try and squash it or get rid of it. And so we keep,
sometimes we internalize it on ourselves and when that happens we feel shame and
that maps to that two cold state so an analogy for this I love analogies for
understanding the nervous system because it’s really complex but imagine that the
state of regulation is like a warm bath you know but we’ve got the warm bath and
the water’s in there so you’ve got the hot water, you’ve got the cold water. But
if we keep turning off this hot water, saying I shouldn’t get angry, I shouldn’t do
anything, I shouldn’t say anything, eventually the bath gets colder and colder and
colder. And in that cold state is where we have things like depression, burnout,
hopelessness and shame. And so for a lot of people that antidote is actually
allowing more of that hot water to come in but to do it in a way where we can
work with it or or feel it without it being too much for us and then taking
action and that’s really what a healthy nervous system is about that we can listen
to what’s going on in our body and also our brain but connect to our body and
then use that information to make an empowered decision that takes care of us
emotionally and also our other needs.
Colleen: So you talk about it being a healthy nervous
system is a flexible and adaptable nervous system. What are some of the steps that
a person can do if they are finding themselves kind of stuck in either the hot or
the cold areas.
Jessica: Yeah, it’s a great question. And I love that you framed it for
either state because we tend to hear this as like, you know, the healthy nervous
system is just calming down. But it’s so much more complex than that. But also,
this is where we want to have this skill to, first of all, understand what state
we are in. So if we recognize,
oh, that’s my heart beating faster, I’m noticing my palms are a bit clammy,
my shoulders are tensing up and I feel this urgency. Oh, this could be that
sympathetic state that I’m moving into. And so what I’ve heard from thousands of
students is that Just by recognizing, “Oh, this is my nervous system responding,
there’s not something wrong with me,” immediately that brings a sense of regulation
and a sense of control or being back in the driver’s seat because it’s like, “Okay,
I recognize that I’ve got this urgency and my nervous system wants to do something
and I can hear the thoughts from this state, which are something bad’s gonna happen.
You need to take action now. I can recognize why I’m getting really wound up at
people. That in itself will bring regulation to your nervous system.
Because you stop going, there’s something wrong with me, or I’m so worked up, why
can’t I just get control over it? And then you start to recognize, okay, this is
this is what’s, these are responses in my body. And that’s the same as well for
looking at that state where we might be feeling more collapsed, hopeless,
you know, that we say story follows state. So the story from that cold state or
the hypo arousal state really sounds like things are hopeless. “This will never work
out. I’ll never get whatever it is that I’m trying for.” And that can really derail
- So seeing that clearly as is this reality or is this my nervous system,
that in itself will completely change the way that we are,
how stuck we get, ’cause we tend to get stuck in these states and that’s what we
call dysregulation. So for men, people who tend to be too mobilized,
some of the ways that we can work with this is really through letting this energy
come through us and move because we get this release of adrenaline and cortisol and
they are telling us, move, we’ve got glucose coming into our system to give energy
to our brain. And if we’re sitting all day with that, it just builds and builds
and builds and builds. So movement is one of the best things that we can do. It
doesn’t need to be a spin class, you know, it can be a 10 minute really fast walk
where we get our heart rate up and we feel that change in our system. For people
who tend to be towards the state of collapse or shut down or feeling hopeless,
there tends to be a feeling of disconnection and so this can be disconnection from
our own body, it can be disconnection from people but it can feel like disconnection
from the world you know it’s that sense of I’m alone I don’t belong and this is
where I love co -regulation for this ability for whether the people around us will
change our nervous system. So it doesn’t mean that we need to go and talk about
what’s going on. It can simply mean that we go to, instead of isolating ourselves
and being alone, we might go out to a place where there are lots of people. You
know, we might go get a coffee and just have that connection with our barista. We
might go to a yoga class, we don’t have to talk to anyone, but we’re part of this
group and we’re not, we stop feeling so alone. So it’s very much when we connect
with others, the vagus nerve through what’s called its social engagement system,
the system of running between our heart and our face, connecting with others, it
actually changes our physiology and moves us back towards regulation. You know,
for so long as a health professional, I looked at people as like, well, this is
your nervous system inside of you. And once I started to say, what else is going
on in this person’s life? What’s happening in their relationships in their
environment? Did I really begin to see the full picture? And that’s,
that’s what we call the bio-social model of health.
Bridgett: Right. Yeah. You have some
great examples in your book as well of different situations. The girl at the
beginning was having a terrible rash. You talk about how medicines were treating it,
but then you found out what was really causing the problem was some, just her
relationship with her roommate. And then that was spinning from that. So that really,
you know, it really woke me up to think, okay, so, so there’s other things, like
you said, you could treat it with a bandaid, but then you could also really treat
it and find out what’s happening and what’s going on. You also talk a lot about
the wear and tear that’s caused by just cumulus, just overload of trauma and stress.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jessica: – Yeah, for sure. We can look at this as
what we call allostatic load. Now that sounds very fancy, but if we take it down
to the basics of what stress is, because it gets a bad rap, doesn’t it?
We talk about it as if all stress is bad, but stress is actually good for us,
or it’s okay for us as long as we get to recover fully from it.
So if you think of this a little bit like this thermostat,
you know, we’ve got a set temperature in a house and we might find that it gets
really hot and so we put the air conditioning on and then that comes back down to
that set temperature. So it’s a little bit like if we have something in our life
we need to deal with that mobilizing energy coming into our system is extremely
powerful. It will increase our focus, it’ll give us the energy to deal with it,
you know, that gives us that strength and mastery. So without that we might feel a
bit helpless. Now what initially happens when we have a challenge,
just say it was an acute challenge, the vagus nerve actually releases its break
that’s on our heart. So it’s a little bit like if you’re riding a bicycle downhill,
you just keep your fingers on that break so you don’t go too fast. Well, when we
need to face a challenge, we might just relax that a little bit. So then what
happens is the mobilizing energy comes in. So that’s that sympathetic energy. And
then afterwards the break re -engages and we slow back down. Now, we’ll feel this,
you know, it’s that (sighs) that was a lot. But sometimes we feel deeply satisfied
as well. Like if you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone, done something a bit
challenging afterwards. You’re like, well, that was big, but it was also great. And
then you might notice a drop in your energy. You know, I often find that after
speaking events, like I feel so satisfied, but I need to have a little bit of
downtime. But what, when we talk about chronic and traumatic stress, what happens is
the recovery period doesn’t come. So, I’ve just been in LA,
connecting with the community there after the wildfires. And you’ll see that,
yes, there’ll be that initial period, which for many people, that was traumatic
stress, you know, it was stress that was way too high. So what happens there is
the same thing. The break comes off from the vagus nerve. We get this activation of
that sympathetic mobilizing energy, but in much, much higher levels. But at the same
time, we actually have the energy from that handbrake,
the dorsal vagal break, coming in as well. So we feel mobilized, but we’re also
like, almost frozen, I don’t know what to do. Now with chronic for people who
had like the overwhelming stress they thought they were going to lose the house then
let’s say they’re evacuated if they can’t find anywhere to leave their children are
asking where are my toys where are our things you know it’s it’s that day after
day after day it could be for some people going through a divorce you know and
you’ve got the not only the breakup but then all the financials, then all the
family stuff. And it just, it keeps going with wave after wave. So we don’t get
that recovery where the vagus nerve can come back in. So if we take this as an
example, let’s say you work in a place where it’s a healthy environment that
encourages you to grow. The vagal break would come off. We’d have the increase in
our heart rate, our blood pressure would actually increase as well, which most people
think high blood pressure, but in the case of the short term, that actually is
really helpful for us. Now, after the day’s over or after a period’s over and the
vagal break comes back in, our heart rate and our blood pressure would come back
down. But let’s say we keep having these really stressful events and we are in a
chronic state where our blood pressure is elevated, we can say,
well, that’s happening day after day, week after week, year after year, that might
be the precursor to what we call hypertension, where we have this chronically
elevated high blood pressure. We can see this in the gut, you know, and we used to
think something like irritable bowel syndrome was the gut disorder, but it’s just
being reclassified as a disorder of the interactions between the brain and the gut
that’s carried out by the vagus nerve. So that’s coming up because of that
dysregulation of our nervous system. And so these, a lot of the patients that I
worked with, and this is what got me so interested in the nervous system, was they
were having these symptoms, but they weren’t getting any answers of what was actually
going on. And they were ongoing. And when they had something challenging in their
lives happened, they got worse. So I really wanted to get to looking at,
well, how do we work with work with that root cause, where we can help people
manage it from what’s happening, but also stop it happening in the first place. And
nervous system regulation, particularly for where we look at gut directed with
something like irritable bowel syndrome is one of the most helpful things we can do.
And it’s challenging because we think, well, this is a gut problem, but it’s actually
just as much as a brain problem or the way that the body and brain are
communicating, which is the nervous system.
Colleen: What can you do in that instance,
if it is as someone who has suffered from IBS for decades, how can you regulate
your nervous system to not connect it down to your gut?
Not, I mean, it’s going to connect, but to slow or regulate.
Jessica: Yeah, it’s a great question, Colleen. The biggest thing is about spending time in that
state where you’re regulated. So we really look at, okay, well,
do you spend more time in the sympathetic or the too hot state or the too cold
state? And then you look at, well, do I need to down -regulate or up-regulate and
the more time you spend in regulation, the more your gut motility improves.
So basically the vagus nerve is controlling the rate that food moves through the
digestive tract. It’s, which we call gut mobility. Now, if we want a healthy gut
microbiome, then what we need to have is that the mobility or the way that the
food is moving through the gut is at this nice regulated rhythm. But stress will
change that. And that’s where we can get these pockets and distensions where it
creates bloating and pain through the gut. And so we come back to regulation first,
it will improve the health of the microbiome. So it’s a bit like we work with the
soil for the microbiome. The the main part of being able to look at what’s
happening with IBS as well is that we get these sensitizations and alarms to the
brain that’s like oh this is wrong this is not okay like when we when we feel the
sensations coming from our gut which is carried via the vagus. So As we send signals
to the brain, like things are okay down here from the gut. What we find is that
the brain then says, “Oh, okay, we’re great.” And it changes the messages down to
the gut. And so it’s like, if you think about this ongoing feedback loop, we’re
jumping in and changing the way that they speak to each other when we bring nervous
system regulation, particularly the vagus nerve. But it’s so interesting, isn’t it?
Because we’ve long thought, well, it’s my diet. It’s because I’ve eaten these foods.
And yes, food does play a role in this going forward. You know, there might be
some things that we need to limit, but what is mostly at play is the interaction
between the gut and the brain because they’re communicating 24 hours a day with each
other.
Bridgett: That that is so interesting how that all works because it not only for IBS,
but there’s so many other situations where you’re going to feel a certain way and
it’s going to come through in your body. Just like you said that you hunch your shoulders, The heart
palpitations or sweating or before something happens,
like sometimes when something’s happening. And I don’t even know I’m doing this, like
scrunching up my shoulders. And then I’m like, why are my shoulders so tight? And
I’m like, Oh, my gosh, it could be watching a scary movie that that happens to me.
It could be anything like that.
Jessica: There are so many fascinating things that that you
have there.
Colleen: I know that you talk about different networks. So I know in the book
there were like four networks that are different senses. I think you use different
senses. Can you talk about how the senses are?
You know, we have we have our five
senses, but then there’s other senses as well.
Jessica: Yeah, I’d love to. This ties in so
beautifully from what we’re talking about with IBS as well. So if you have heard of
your five outer facing senses, This is, you know, our sight, our smell,
our touch, our taste. These are all important for our nervous system. We know that
our nervous system, like what state we move into, will be picking up signals from
our environment that’s outside of our conscious awareness. So people are like,
well, it’s exactly what you said, Bridgett. You find yourself like this and you’re
like, oh, How did I get here? So what we might see play out is with the people
around us, you know, if we in an environment where we are around a lot of highly
stressed people, our nervous system is taking in those messages. We might not be
aware of it consciously, but it’s sending messages to this lower center in our brain
called the survival brain. And then the next sense is what we call proprioception.
So this is your awareness of the position of your body in space,
like your joints. Now the fact that you can close your eyes and touch your nose
and you know where your nose is, that’s proprioception. And like if you try and
touch somebody else’s nose with your eyes closed, it’s going to be completely
different. But this proprioception is really important and it’s often not talked about
enough in anxiety because to know where your body is in space and your brain has a
picture of that, that is very grounding and centering.
Now if we don’t have this connection to where our body is in space because we have
changes in those systems. What can tend to happen is we often feel a little bit
off kilter. And so these are beautiful practices for regulation. Now,
part of that I spoke about before as well is where we can look at movement or
kinesthesia and being able to notice movement through our body can also bring us
back to to regulation. The next sense it has to do with the vestibular system and
the position of our head in space. So if you’ve been on an airplane and you feel
the plane moving and you can feel that without looking, that can be your vestibular
system. For some people it gives the motion sickness as well if their vestibular
system is very sensitive. And then the final sense which is really what relates to
IBS is interception. So in means inside,
interception is how we notice our bodily signals. Now what’s really interesting about
interception is that we have this communication loop going on all the time from our
body to our brain And most of that we won’t be aware of.
So most of the time, sensations like digesting our food, we don’t notice.
But when we have irritable bowel syndrome, we will notice those sensations more.
And so if we look at what’s happening there, the vagus nerve is sending signals
from the lower centers in the brain, but we might as I said we may not be aware
of it, but it will be changing how our body then shifts our physiology. So let’s
say if we took an example like you’re walking up here and you know you don’t
notice your heart rate when you’re walking on the flat but as you start to come up
the hill you’re like oh there’s my heart beating you’re going to that’s coming into
your awareness. And then you’ll have a whole process of events that change based on
that. So your breathing might change, you know, you’ll notice that your digestive
system changes, everything creates a shift based on that in the body. What’s really
interesting is the signals that come up to our brain that we are aware of.
That process can be changed, not consciously from us,
but through chronic and traumatic stress. So if we imagine that we’ve got a volume
dial in our brain with sensations, what the research has shown is that people who
tend to be more depressed, cut off, numb and flat, it’s like the volume is turned
down too low. And so there’s that feeling of emotional numbness.
Why this is challenging is that the body sensations that we notice are the
foundation for emotional regulation. So for instance, if you can’t notice your jaw
tightening, your heart beating up, the feeling of urgency in your shoulders coming up
when your hand’s going into fists, you might flip out at someone because you didn’t
notice the irritation that was there. So you can’t proactively manage your emotions
when you can’t notice bodily sensations. You know we used to explain emotions like
there was this one little spot in our brain But emotions are a whole brain
experience that are really being influenced by the messages sent up to the brain.
So it’s bodily signals that are the foundation to emotions. Now,
if somebody is hypervigilant or highly anxious, it’s like the volume is turned up
too high. And So sensations often feel overwhelming,
they can make us feel panicked out of control, like just way too big for us.
And that can be another response that happens after chronic and traumatic stress, but
it could just be unique to our particular nervous system as well. And so this can
be with inter -reception changes. What we’re seeing now, it’s coming up with anxiety,
we’re seeing it in depression, we’re seeing it with IBS, chronic pain, eating
disorders, lots and lots of issues where we can’t really get to what the root cause
might be. And so working with this 8th sensory system,
it not only changes your emotional regulation, but it really changes your physical
health too. And just like if, you know, I sprained my ankle, I could go and
retrain my proprioception or the joint receptors in my ankle so that I would then
be able to know where my ankle is, you know, and not sprain it again, I can
retrain interoception by learning to get better at reading sensations accurately and
that ties into what we said before. This is how we learn to see reality as it is
rather than responding to the past.
Colleen: You talk about when I was listening to your TED talk, you talk about the importance
of play. Is that kind of the movement you were talking about before, get your body
moving, things like that.
Jessica: – Yeah, absolutely Colleen. So play is a blended state.
Now, so if we talk about, we’ve got our regulation like that band of nervous system
regulation and then we have above that this mobilization,
you know, when we feel our energy mobilized, play is a way that we can learn to
let this mobilizing energy come into our system, but we can keep it in check with
the vagal break. So imagine that what we said before about riding our bicycle
downhill, we keep the brake on. Well, if we just relax that a little bit and let
this mobilizing energy in, play is really an antidote to when we get too anxious.
So a lot of students that I’ve worked with have said, you know, even things that
are exciting or positive, I get anxious about because they get this mobilizing energy
come in, but they can’t keep it in check, you know, it’s too much. And so we play
what we’re learning to do is let this mobilizing energy in,
but stay connected to safety. and this relates back to retraining our body to be
able to read these signals accurately. So when we move into the state of play,
what we can do is tune into our bodily signals in a way that we feel safe and
connected. And we’re really, it’s like the gym for our nervous system. We’re letting
this energy in, we’re keeping it in check. And it’s not about living a life where
we limit our stresses and we try not to do anything that’s going to make us
anxious. I think nervous system regulation, people might think of as sitting on a
mat and being very zen and calm. That’s not it at all. We need to have a greater
capacity to go into these states like mobilization,
but learn how to keep for the Vegas nerve to keep that in check. And that’s why
play is so beautiful. But the other part we play is if we’re down in that state
where we feel flat, and we feel hopeless, play will upregulate our energy,
you know, we’re bringing in the mobilization, which is the way to get out of that
state. And so, you know, we ran a challenge recently and we had 4 ,000 people join
us for seven days of play. And it was just amazing.
Like I got so inspired hearing the way that people were connecting with their
children through music, through games, through dancing, through going out with friends,
through the dates that they had with their partners and it wasn’t like hours and
hours of you know a practice it was tying it into what they were already doing so
it was really beautiful to see that come about and the changes that people
discovered from having more play in their lives. That it sounds really that
sounds really fun.
Bridgett: – And you also are doing a workshop. So can you talk a little bit about your
workshop?
Jessica: – Yes, so the Vegas Nerve Program is starting soon and this is an eight
week program. So we really go into each of these facets that we’ve spoken about
today, like the Vegas Nerve’s gut brain connection, the connection from the heart to
the brain. We look at interception and all those sensory systems. We look at co
-regulation, connection and the social engagement system but it’s very much experiential
and we come together live to practice the exercises. We use breakout rooms so we
can actually workshop these things and create a different experience in our brain
body system because we can’t tell our nervous system that it’s safe. You know,
we can’t say, “Hey, things are great.” It actually doesn’t work when we are anxious
or when we are shut down. We need to come into the body and show our nervous
system that we are safe. And that’s really what the eight week program is about,
which is built upon the principles of neuroplasticity, which is how our nervous
system changes.
Bridgett: And how can people find out more information about that?
If you head to my website jessicamaguire.com everything’s there.
Colleen: Well great and we’ll
have it all in our show notes as well. Thank you so much Jessica for coming on
today and talking about the nervous system, the vagus nerve and how we can better
take care of ourselves and be aware of it. We appreciate it.
Jessica: Thank you so much for having me.