42. ELIZABETH STANLEY: The Biology of Resilience

Episode Transcript

Note: Transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. Please refer to the episode audio or video for exact quotes.

Elizabeth: [00:00:00] We are built so that we learn the downregulation through the soothing we receive from our parents and other early caregivers. And that presumes that our early caregivers and parents were regulated enough to do that for us.

Michael: Hi, I am Michael Hyatt.

Elizabeth: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller,

Michael: and you’re listening to The Double Win Show.

And today I’m flying solo. Megan is usually with me, she’s my oldest daughter, but today she’s with one of her daughters at a special event. And I can’t wait to introduce you to this week’s guest, Dr. Elizabeth Stanley, and I’ll tell you my personal story about it in a minute. But Elizabeth is a professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

She’s a US Army veteran, former military intelligence officer. She’s developed a program called MFFT. She’ll tell you about it in the program, but it’s basically a resilience program that’s been taught to thousands of people in high stress [00:01:00] environments, first responders, military personnel, and yes executives.

So she hold degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT. Her book Widened the Window, which is where I first became aware of her Blend Science, personal narrative, and practical tools. She’s also certified in Somatic Experience Therapy, which we’ve talked about on this show before. But I got introduced to her when my daughter Mary, interviewed her on her podcast Fully Alive, and Mary said to me, she said, dad, I think.

This would help you and I think you’d enjoy it. I listened to it and boy did it resonate. I promptly went out and bought her book, widen the Window, which I highly recommend, but I resonate all through that. It’s what ultimately led me to confront and deal with my own chronic anxiety and to get into somatic experience therapy where I’ve made huge progress over the last two years.

I’m not. Fully, you [00:02:00] know where I wanna be, but I’m a long way down the the road and I just thank God that I had the opportunity to hear from Liz, and I know you’ll feel the same. So here’s our interview.

Liz, welcome to the show.

Elizabeth: Michael, thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here with you today.

Michael: We’re gonna have a good time. I’m so excited to get the backstory here. You tell it in the book, but in the forward to your book, Bessel VanDerKolk, who’s the author of Body Keeps the Score, he said that based on a friend’s comment that all research is me search.

Elizabeth: Yes.

Michael: Which means that we tend to research the issues that we have problems with ourselves. So how does your personal story intersect with this topic?

Elizabeth: It absolutely does. I definitely think of myself as exhibit A of a mind body system, experiencing a whole wide range of stressful and traumatic events, and then having the effects of that happen and then [00:03:00] experimenting with different ways of beginning to recover from that and eventually developing resilience training from that.

So that in a very short nutshell, was my journey, but I grew up. In a military family, um, ninth generation in the US Army. It was a violent household occasionally, but alcoholic and I experienced a lot of childhood adversity and sexual violence in childhood in an early adulthood. And then I went into the Army.

I had an ROTC scholarship, and I served overseas in Korea and Germany, and two deployments in the Balkans. Stressful military training. I was having physical symptoms already by then, but was chalking it up to crazy hours. And when we were in Bosnia, I needed to be resuscitated. I flatlined and needed to be resuscitated, and that was a big shock on the body.

And then I was dealing with, uh, sexual harassment in my chain of command and reprisal after I reported it. So I left active duty, [00:04:00] got to graduate school, and at this point I have two and a half decades of chronic activation where I was never really recovering and I had coped with that. The way most people who are high achieving in our culture cope with that, like many of your listeners, I’m sure compartmentalizing it, kind of pushing it to the side and keep going.

In the army, we call that, suck it up and drive on. And then it just got to the point where it was debilitating while I was in graduate school and I started first with talk therapy, which is kind of the go-to in our culture. Still didn’t really move the needle. And then I was started experimenting with yoga and other MINDBODY techniques.

I found mindfulness, but. In many cases, practicing mindfulness made it worse and no one could explain to me why. And that made me really curious. So someone eventually suggested some of the body-based techniques, and I did body-based trauma therapy, somatic experiencing. I eventually got certified as a practitioner myself, did [00:05:00] the clinical training.

And through all of that I was really curious to understand what is it about? My mind and body that’s having a different response from what the therapist says should happen, or the, you know, meditation teacher says, should happen. And so I got really curious about the science, the neurobiology of how minds and bodies, you know, go through stress and trauma and how they’re resilient.

And it led into this process of developing my resilience training program, partnered with neuroscientists and stress researchers. We tested it in military settings with combat troops before they went to Iraq and Afghanistan. All that published research is on my website, and then I started sharing it in lots of other high stress settings, including in corporate settings and.

The one thing that really sort of is my takeaway from, at this point, more than 20 years of this arc, of this like recovery and then sharing it with others. Just seeing how much we as a culture [00:06:00] collectively don’t yet understand how much the mind and body has its own lawful way of working, and how much our minds then take things personally or begin to identify with things in ways that really are just the mind and body doing its conditioning.

And so for me, learning all that science was hugely liberating. It made me. Not take it all so personally. And it also helped me understand the leverage points for the little things we can do differently that really can open up a very different way of moving through the world. And that’s what I share in the resilience course, mindfulness based mind fitness training, and it’s what I share in my book, widen the Window.

Michael: Fantastic. You know, I think when I started to recognize as a result of your work that I had suffered from chronic anxiety that I hadn’t dealt with. Decades. I thought I was all alone. And what I discovered, and I wondered if you [00:07:00] had the same experience, I thought, you know, I can’t really talk about this because you know, it’s a defect.

I mean, this is a weakness. But then I finally, for whatever reason, I decided to share it with a mastermind that I lead. And I mean, people were in tears. Mm. People were coming up to me afterwards and saying, I thought I was the only one. You know, one guy was telling me I can’t even sleep at night unless I take at least two Trazodone.

200 milligrams. Wow. And you know, other people just say, man, I just, I was close to suicide. Just real struggles. Yeah. From real ordinary people, successful entrepreneurs that when you look at ’em, you think they’ve got it all figured out. But did you discover that that many, many people, maybe most people struggle with this?

Elizabeth: Absolutely. I think it’s because our culture tends to. Really have tendencies to disown aspects of our experience. We romanticize stress, being stressed out or you know, having too much [00:08:00] to do and not taking vacation. Mm-hmm. All of those things are sort of coded as someone’s being successful without really owning all the things that go alongside it.

And so the other things aren’t really being discussed and all we see is each other’s public persona that’s looking so, you know, successful and put together in my life. I felt like I was living a total double life. On the one hand I was, you know, doing two degrees at the same time and moving towards a tenure job at Georgetown.

And by anyone’s kind of external sense of successful, I was moving in that direction. But inside my body I was struggling all the time. I had the worst insomnia. I would have these massive crying jags at home. It was like worse than imposter syndrome. It was just this constant. When is the other shoe gonna fall?

It was, I was just always sort of in this very, something bad is about to happen and I didn’t discuss it with anyone. I felt like everyone else has it all together. [00:09:00] This must just be me. And the thing that has just shocked me, and the reason why I include so much of my story in the book, because that had not been my plan originally to share as much of my story, but to realize every time I teach.

It could be a 30 minute webinar, it could be a longer thing afterwards. Inevitably, there are always at least a handful of people who come up right after to then share their story. And then over the next, you know, number of weeks, I get these really long emails where people share how hard it is to be human on the planet today.

The constant refrain that you shared there, Michael, I thought it was only me. I didn’t think this was going on with anyone else. And we’re all in it together and we’re all experiencing the particular lawful ways that this human mind and body works in this particular poly crisis world. Of course, people are struggling.[00:10:00]

It’s kind of why it’s my passion to help people understand you’re not alone in this. There are actually very concrete leverage points we have and it’s lawful the conditioning we have, we built up over the course of our life. We built it up unconsciously and it’s running its programming. We can interrupt it and it’s lawful.

We have choices with it and that’s what I really want to make sure your listeners are, are gonna get.

Michael: I think one big takeaway here for those of you listening is that if you’re despairing. There’s no help for your condition. There absolutely is. Yeah, and it’s science-based. It’s clinically researched and it just flat out works, and it’s really helped me over the last two years.

You know, I wouldn’t say I’m completely anxiety free. I’m not sure that you’ll ever get completely anxiety free, no

Elizabeth: tools

Michael: to manage it now like I never did before. Which brings me to two questions here. One is, what would be some of the symptoms that maybe you have? [00:11:00] Nervous system dysregulation, let’s call it that.

’cause it could show up as anxiety or depression or PTSD or something else.

Elizabeth: Yes. It can show up in a lot of different ways because the way that the stress arousal system and immune system and our hormone system, our endocrine system, they’re all interrelated. And when one of them gets dysregulated, they all do.

And so it can show up in so many different ways and that’s why so many people don’t. Make the connection, oh, this is dysregulation in my mind and body and there’s a core thing I can do that handles all of it, but some of the ways it shows up, well cognitively it might show up as trouble remembering appointments, forgetting where you left the keys, trying to concentrate, not being able to concentrate.

Feeling really distracted all the time. Feeling really kind of fuzzy in your head all the time. Having constant kind of anxious racing thoughts or looping thoughts where it’s just the same thought patterns come back over and over. Or catastrophizing where you’re like always [00:12:00] imagining the worst case scenario and always in that planning to-do list.

All of those are ways it can show up cognitively. Physiologically it can show up as upset. Stomach, constipation, gerd, um, just kind of weight gain or lack of appetite. It can show up as chronic pain. It’s effortful to do that suppression, and it shows up as chronic muscle tension. That becomes kind of a, a tightening in the body that eventually can become chronic gain patterns.

It can show up in our habits to try and cope. When we’re feeling uncomfortable, John Kazen calls them stress reaction cycle habits. I think of them as window of tolerance, window narrowing habits. These are things that might soothe in the short term, but they’re not giving us real recovery and they become our go-to.

So it might be alcohol in the evening to come down, or a lot of caffeine in the morning to kind of wake up. It could be a lot of comfort food or junk food eating. Constant doom [00:13:00] scrolling or a lot of binge watching of television. It could be self-harming behaviors or real adrenaline junkie behaviors. I was a massive adrenaline junkie over exerciser, and I thought that was, you know, me keeping in shape.

It actually was one of the ways that I was trying to manage this constant stuck on high. Anxious kind of energy. And then in terms of emotions, there might be anxiety, there might be constant irritability or impatience. Many people don’t think of irritability and impatience as a sign of dysregulation. It is.

It could be waves of overwhelm or we might have a lot of problems with procrastination or this like whipsaw between a lot of procrastination and then this insane binging. Pulling all-nighters to catch up. I know that’s a very common one in, in high stress professions, especially among leaders. That’s to give a sample.

There’s many others to make the point for your listeners, this is really global and we don’t [00:14:00] tend to think of these things as all connected.

Michael: You know, I, I think that it would be easy for people listening to this to think that maybe their situation is unique or somehow their brain’s broken, or their mind body connection is broken.

What’s the science behind this? Because I think. When I started diving into that, I think you said it was like it was a relief. Yes, it was. And for me it was a tremendous relief too, to know that so much of this behavior is just my brain, primitive brain trying to keep me safe. Yes. And it doesn’t do a great job, frankly, over function.

Sometimes

Elizabeth: it does, and that’s in large part because of what we are trying to do. We are wired organically to be able to mobilize the energy to manage a crisis or a stressful situation, and then recover. And our ancestors that shared the same wiring that we have who did not have 24 7. Constant activation and constant [00:15:00] demands the way that we do in modern life today.

They could mobilize the energy when a saber-tooth tiger was there and fight it or flee from it, and then they would hide out in a cave and they could have a lot of time to have their system recover. They didn’t have the email dinging and they didn’t have traffic happening, and they didn’t have bills to pay, and all the other things that keep many of us constantly turning this on and not turning it off.

Short answer on the the science. We each have a window of tolerance to stress, arousal that we’ve wired throughout our life. When we are inside our window, we can have all of our thinking, brain functions, executive functioning, paying attention, making plans, following through, remembering things explicitly that we need for work, conscious decision making, all those functions still online and working well.

And we have the capacity to vary how much arousal our mind and body are experiencing without going outside the [00:16:00] window. So we have our survival brain keeping us safe, moving, bringing as much activation as it needs so that we’re meeting whatever’s happening with what we need, and then we’re recovering enough, we’re keeping our thinking brain online so we can make decisions.

We can integrate these two systems. Most of us though in our culture, have moved outside of our window, or we very much have narrowed our window because we’ve been turning stress activation on without getting a full recovery. That means we’re leaving the system constantly running in the background, and that begins to build a stress load.

The science term there is allostatic load, and the more our stress load grows, the less capacity we have in our mind and body to meet the next challenge so that it becomes a bit of a vicious cycle, and we know that we’re on the kind of edge of our window or outside of our window of tolerance. When we either default like I did to that, suck it up and drive on that thinking, brain override, just [00:17:00] sort of suppressing and compartmentalizing everything and it’s that fuels a survival brain unconscious kind of lock system, sort of, oh, whatever that is.

It’s too big, it’s too scary, it’s too much. I’m saving that for later. I can’t uncover that thing. Now. It’s too big to manage your face and we just sort of shove it under. It takes a tremendous amount of effort for our system to do that. And that then drives so many of these symptoms that we end up developing that effortful, keeping it at bay.

I did that for 25 years. It took a real cost. The other way that that can manifest is then our survival brain is driving it and it kind of hijacks our system and we might collapse into kind of overwhelm or we might have a really bad temper or we might have, as you said, very intense anxiety or we might get very impulsive or reactive.

That’s also outside the window and there’s plenty of examples of [00:18:00] that in our world to date.

Michael: Well, the title of your book is Widen the Window. Hmm. Which kind of presupposes that that’s possible to become more resilient and more able to deal with the stressors in a healthy, healthy way. So explain more about the window and then how can we widen it.

Elizabeth: So we each have been wiring this window before we were even born because a big component of how much stress arousal our window can handle has to do with how we wire our brain, the thinking brain, and the survival brain, both systems and how we’ve wired our autonomic nervous system, which connects from the survival brain down into.

All of our organs, so it controls breathing and heart rate. And our digestive system, our ability to rela rest and relax our reproductive functions, all of [00:19:00] that controlled by this unconscious system. And when we’re born, we have the ability to turn stress on. We have the ability to get into that paralysis, overwhelm.

It’s called freeze. One of the, the kind of evolutionarily oldest of our responses. But when we’re born, we have not yet wired how to downregulate after stress. In fact, as humans, because our system is so socially. We have so much social wiring. We are built so that we learn the downregulation through the soothing we receive from our parents and other early caregivers.

And that presumes that our early caregivers and parents were regulated enough to do that for us. So for many of us, my parents, my dad was back from multiple tours in Vietnam. He had PTSD. My mom was dealing with some massive postpartum depression because of things going on in her life. [00:20:00] Neither of them were really downregulating.

So from the very beginning, my system didn’t learn that capacity. So from the very beginning of our life, we might have a narrowed window. Children might have parents with wider windows, they learn it. But later in life, if we experience arousal and don’t recover, the window narrows, but it’s not a one-way ticket that it only goes in a narrow direction.

Everything about our mind and body is the result of repeated experiences, and most of our repeated experiences come from habits, often unconscious ones. But once we understand that, how much repeated experience is the leverage point? We can start choosing different repeated experiences. When we go into that anxious worrying loop of the to-do list, recognize, oh, I’m worrying.

And we can interrupt it and we can redirect our attention somewhere else. And over time, that habit atrophies. And if we’re redirecting it somewhere that the survival brain [00:21:00] perceives as safe, that actually starts conditioning. A process that makes the system move back in the way that we’re organically built, which is to go through stress and recover naturally.

We just, most of us are overriding it all the time. So it is fully possible to rewire and widen our window, but it’s not, and this is part of our kind of, we want everything immediately in, in our culture. Thing. Everybody wants a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet about our biology. Like it took me more than three decades to narrow my window that much.

It didn’t take me more than three decades to widen it, but it wasn’t like I could do it in a weekend like that. I mean, it, it took constant choice over several months to begin to have that change.

Michael: Well, it seems like so many of those experiences get hard coded Yes. Into our biology. Yes. And so we develop these neural pathways.

That it’s just like you said, I mean, there’s a trigger. We run the program, there’s a trigger, we run the program and [00:22:00] unthinkingly. So

Elizabeth: yes, it’s totally unconscious, at least initially, until we understand the science and we begin to pay attention to the cues that show us that programming has started running.

Michael: But the human brain is remarkably neuroplastic and even neuro, neuro regenerative. Some of the study I’ve done, you know, has been really trying to get back to that. Mm-hmm. Where I’ve got the ability to make choices where sometimes it just feels like I don’t have the choice to do this. But you do. Yeah.

It’s just that you’re not aware of it.

Elizabeth: Yes. The first thing is becoming aware of those choice points and then starting to act on them. And for me, and for many of the people that I’ve trained who have big trauma loads and stress loads from earlier in their life. When that conditioning gets triggered and it just sort of starts again, especially at that point, when you start becoming conscious of it, there is this sense of powerlessness, like, Ugh, I’m stuck in this groove.

I’m never gonna get out of this groove. It [00:23:00] is really important to be able to name this is a choice point, and even if it doesn’t fully shift, just naming it and making a small shift. It begins to rewire and update so that the survival brain can now perceive that we do have agency. And that is a really critical part of being able to start having the shifts happen in a more substantial way.

That updating of the survival brain sense of. There is agency here because when we don’t perceive agency, when we feel powerless or helpless, that actually leads to higher levels of arousal and it really re solidifies the prior conditioning. So being able to access that choice point is really critical in beginning to shift it.

Michael: I don’t wanna get too much in the weeds, but I wanna ask you about the vagus nerve. Mm-hmm. Because there’s a lot of attention in this work and somatic experience therapy about the vagus nerve. Could you explain that? In layman’s terms, and this is what you’re so [00:24:00] gifted at, and help us understand that and what we might be able to do with regard to that to improve our situation.

Elizabeth: Absolutely. The vagus nerve is really implicated in our parasympathetic nervous system. Our autonomic nervous system has a sympathetic branch, which you can think of as like putting pedal to the metal. It’s the fight or flight. It’s the mobilizing energy so that we can respond to a threat. The parasympathetic nervous system has two branches and it’s, they run down the vagus nerve and there is the dorsal branch that runs down the backside of the body, and it connects into the digestive system, into our sexual organs, and the ventral side down the front of the body, connects into the face, the eyes, the throat, the voice down into the heart and lungs.

So the parasympathetic side, sympathetic is the gas pedal. Parasympathetic is the break, and [00:25:00] it allows, it has three different functions that are working. Depending upon whether our survival brain has perceived safety or danger, the functions are slightly different, but in general, it’s doing rest, digest, recovery, sleep.

And it’s also providing our ability to connect socially. So humans. Number one, most adaptive response to threat is actually social engagement. We’re wired that way and that’s why the ventral, the front side, the ventral parasympathetic nervous system controls social engagement, controls our eye muscles so that we can make eye contact and widen and, and squint.

We can make smiles, controls our facial muscles. It controls our ability to mod. Our voice as I’m doing with you right now and my hand motions. It controls our neck and head muscles so that we can move and orient and find the thread around us, and then it controls our cardiovascular system and our breathing system.

It goes [00:26:00] down into the heart and lungs. So ideally when we’re inside of our window. The ventral parasympathetic nervous system is driving the show. It’s letting us connect with people, ask for help, offer help. We can orient to what’s going on, and we can up and down regulate our heart rate and breathing rate without having to turn on all the stress hormones.

That’s our first line of defense. If we have wired our ventral parasympathetic, that part of the nervous system doesn’t come wired when we come out of the womb. That part gets wired through childhood until about 16 years old. So again, if our parents had narrowed windows, if they were coping with a lot of stress and trauma, or if they were absent, if they had mental illness or they were incarcerated, they aren’t.

They are to help us wire those things. It’s one of the ways that narrowed windows get transmitted intergenerationally and why trauma can become intergenerational. So that’s our first line of events. If that’s not working [00:27:00] in whatever the situation is and our system, our survival brain perceives, wait a minute, that’s not enough.

It will then turn on the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight. Starting to mobilize and it’s a mobilize defense, starting to mobilize energy to move our muscles and be able to fight or flight, bring a lot of glucose into the brains that we can focus and figure out how to handle it. And if that’s not enough.

Then we fall back to the third line of defense, which is called freeze. The ventral, the front side of the vagus nerve gets turned off, the backside, gets turned on in its defensive mode, and that sends us into this very immobilized response. So when we’re experiencing traumatic stress, it’s very common for us to get confused or dazed or paralyzed, sort of so overwhelmed.

We don’t know how to respond. That deer in the headlights kind of response and our system [00:28:00] is moving. Onto a spectrum to start shutting us down so we can be really spacey. We can feel like we’re not even in our body. Our breathing gets really shallow. We start oxygen conservation. So it’s really important when we go to widen the window to recognize that ventral and dorsal parasympathetic in the vagus nerve, they’re gonna switch on and off.

So if you’ve turned on the freeze, you’ve lost this ability. Your face gets slack. To begin to correct it, we can start becoming aware, wait a minute, I’m in that space, and start really trying to bring the ventral back online to help us solve that. So in the resilience course I teach, we teach skills for how to do that when we’re in a stressful situation.

Michael: I’m assuming that each of these states, these three states have their proper place? Yes, absolutely. It’s just that when they get activated without intention. We get stuck in one of these [00:29:00] states, that’s where it becomes a problem. Absolutely. Part of the, the resilience part of it, and correct me if I’m wrong, but is the ability to move between these states?

Yes. And downregulate when necessary. Is it also true that the window is synonymous with being in the parasympathetic state?

Elizabeth: That’s a great question. The window is synonymous with being able to move flexibly between all of these states. Okay? And when you are in the sympathetic fight or flight, or you have defaulted because of the level of the stress, I mean, there could be events, a mass shooting.

Many, many, many people will go into a freeze. That’s not a problem. Because it’s aligned with what’s happening in that situation. But being able to move out of it quickly and bring the system back down, someone can with a wider window, will be able to do that. Someone with a narrowed window might end up in freeze and stay in freeze for an [00:30:00] extended period of time.

Mm-hmm. So it really is this ability to flexibly move between them. Have the capacity to keep enough awareness inside the body and mind online, even as the system moves through that. And I have a very wide window now, but even I in a near, you know, near miss accident. I had a very kind of freezing moment.

There was a near miss accident. Someone was about to hit me and I could see my system starting to shift that tunnel vision and I was fully conscious that, oh, I’m going into freeze and it passed within 20 seconds. But if I didn’t know that I could have, if I had not done the work to widen the window, I could have stayed and freeze for quite some time.

Yeah. The effects that we humans and our domesticated animals have. After stressful experiences, it’s not the result of going through that kind of experience. It’s the not coming back down after that is what’s causing the problems. [00:31:00] I mean, while animals go in and out of all of these states all the time, and it’s actually very adaptive.

It widens our window to experience higher than kind of comfort zone states and then fully recover. So it’s not like being resilient needs to be bubble wrapped. We need to be living life. It’s being able to help our system be able to move flexibly through all of that and make sure that whatever arousal level or whichever defensive strategy the system chooses is the one that’s appropriate for that situation.

But for many of us, especially those of us who experienced childhood stress or childhood trauma. Where our system, whatever arousal, the more arousal we’re experiencing, the more our survival brain is kind of clocking and learning from that particular thing. And then in the future, it generalizes from that memory the most.

And if it’s something we didn’t recover from, it thinks it’s not done yet. So it’s generalizing it [00:32:00] from it all the time that we can have something. That our conscious thinking brain might not know is linked to it, but there’s something about the current situation that might be somehow tagged by our survival brain is similar to that thing that we’re generalizing from.

That’s how we can default into one of these programmings, and it’s not at all appropriate from an objective outside observer sense of what’s going on right now because our system is still queued to that because of that unresolved memory capsule. When we heal those, then what’s happening around us and our responses to it can be much more appropriately aligned and flexible.

Michael: You know, as I started to just read about polyvagal theory and understand that I kind of realized the limitations of talk therapy, ’cause this is where I get stuck is in my body. Yes. So could you explain, I think talk therapy is probably good for some things, right? But for this [00:33:00] kind of work. I think embodied therapy is better.

Could you explain why that is on both sides?

Elizabeth: Yes. The first thing I’ll say is. The thinking brain exists to, and its survival strategy, is to try and predict and prevent and anticipate, and plan and decide. It’s all cognitive at stress levels above moderate ones. All of those functions get degraded, but none of those functions that I just shared have to do with regulating stress, arousal, either turning it on or turning it off.

It’s not a thinking brain function. So when we’re in talk therapy, we’re doing all kinds of like remembering the narrative consciously or changing the narrative or, but we’re not getting to the part of our brain and body that is controlling whether we’re turning stress on or off. That is a survival brain job.

So talk therapy is always gonna be incomplete. It might be very helpful, and for me at different points, it was [00:34:00] helpful to begin to understand patterns intellectually that made sense, but it doesn’t get to the root of it because whether we’re turning it on, whether we’re turning it off, and how we’re relating to other people during stress or conflict, all of that is controlled by the survival brain.

So it all comes down to the number one function of the survival brain, which in the literature is called neuroception. It’s the unconscious threat appraisal process that’s happening all the time. Our survival brain’s always scanning around us, and importantly, it’s scanning inside us because the autonomic nervous system has a feedback loop back from the body to the brain.

So if our survival brain says, oh, this moment is threatening or challenging, it turns on stress hormones and then sets the nervous system into its defensive mode and all the things that we were just talking about with the three, you know, defensive responses that starts happening [00:35:00] unconsciously. When the survival brain is scanning around and scanning inside, let’s say if I were sitting here and I had an upset stomach, or my palms were sweaty and it could have nothing to do with anything, it could just be like I had been holding my cup of tea and my palms were sweaty, and if I was had a narrower window, my survival might, might perceive, oh, sweaty palms.

Wait a minute, that’s a sign of activation. What’s going on? I mean, I must, there’s something must be going on if my, my hands are sweaty. So someone who has chronic pain or who has chronic upset stomachs or who has waves of anxious thought or their heart rate is a little elevated that is sending signals back to the survival brain.

And so we can become kind of this like self activating vicious cycle. And I was that for years. For years, it had nothing to do with what was going on around because my system was only queuing on, oh, these things are happening in the body, therefore I must be [00:36:00] unsafe. And then it starts looking for what’s unsafe and turning more arousal on.

So it’s absolutely important for people who are struggling with symptoms. You can’t interrupt that by talk therapy. That has to be by training the survival brain to find safety. Because unless the survival brain can neurop appraise safety in a moment, it won’t automatically turn on all those downregulating functions.

Michael: What might somatic therapy look like? I’ve got my own experience, but I’d love to hear sort of what the range is, because I think people are like, oh, I gotta find a new kind of therapist if I’m really dealing with this. Yeah. And what can I expect? Is it gonna be scary? Is it gonna be. What’s it gonna be like?

Elizabeth: Yeah. It’s so different. And what’s interesting for me is that I’ve sent so many people, and I’ll say it, many [00:37:00] men, when I’ve trained in high stress professions with police or disaster workers or firefighters or, or. For executives, corporate executives, congressmen, and women who are like, I don’t want to do therapy.

I don’t need to do therapy. I’m like, oh, this is really different. You’re not gonna go and sort of talk about what happened. You don’t need to go and sort of share all. It’s not like that. A somatic therapist, in some ways is trained to be surrogate awareness for you. They are sitting there watching, observing your mind and body.

And because of our social wiring, they’re also feeling inside themselves the resonance of what their survival brain is picking up from your survival brain. So they’re reading inside themselves. They’re also watching what’s happening in your mind and body, and they might have you share one or two sentences initially about what’s going on.

Enough to begin to have your system kind of turn on some of the default programming. [00:38:00] And then most somatic therapists at that point will stop the talking entirely, and their purpose is to help guide you to pay attention in particular ways to help your survival brain perceive safety, and then help your survival brain start this automatic downregulating discharging process and they guide it in a way that you do a cycle of recovery safely.

And then they keep you in a kind of grounded space. Maybe you’ll do another cycle, but it’s very body-based and the best way to benefit from that kind of work is to begin to safely, slowly develop awareness of sensations and emotions in the body. And they have different techniques for helping you do that, but they pace it.

And that’s why it’s good to, if you have a lot of unresolved memory capsules and, and traumatic or chronic stress history to do it with someone. Because if you start doing it without someone to help guide and pace it, it’s easy for the system to activate so much that [00:39:00] it can kind of inadvertently flood your system and flood the survival brain.

And so. When I created AM fitt, I very much took that process where the therapist is being the surrogate awareness, and instead helped people learn to provide the awareness for themselves, and we build it gradually because you don’t wanna bring too much awareness in at once. That’s what I did and why things got worse for me.

All of a sudden I’d be sitting and all of a sudden my breathing would stop and I’d focus all my attention on why am I not breathing? And of course. That then is sending the signal back to my survival brain. Oh my God, she’s not breathing. And you know, I’d go into these big, you know, big, big, big flashbacks and then I’d have claustrophobia for days and that was too much.

I didn’t understand the science of it then. But in our course and in other. Programs that are more trauma informed, they help pace this so that you slowly build that awareness and then you begin to learn where to direct your attention to help your survival brain perceive safety. You can, it’s like [00:40:00] setting the conditions for that, and that’s where the thinking brain, understanding the science really makes a difference.

Michael: You know, for me it was the self-awareness in therapy and then we tried a lot of different techniques and some worked better than others. Mm-hmm. So we tried something as simple as orienting, where you just notice the room you’re in. Yes. Or things like breathing, you know, very like box breathing is a great one.

And then we tried EMDR. Mm-hmm. And you know, which is about your eye movement. And then we tried tapping. Mm-hmm. And all of these, by the way, or at least many of them, have been clinically researched with all the highest standards of science and have had a measurable impact on people that. Suffer from suffer anxiety or dysregulation in general?

Yes, but I feel like I got more tools in my toolbox. Yeah. I got the awareness so that I can feel like when I’m moving into that state of fight or flight to the sympathetic state, and then I think, okay. So here are my tools. What am I gonna [00:41:00] use right now? What would be appropriate Yes, right now?

Elizabeth: And the fact that you can do that, that you’re aware of the choice point and you feel that you have the resource of these tools that actually affects then your survival brain’s threat appraisal process.

Because when the Survival Brain is doing neuroception, it’s both taking in whatever the possible threat or challenge is around us. But it’s also taking in what are my internal resources to meet this challenge. And it’s when we don’t have resources to meet it that are going to give us some way to still have.

A sense of choice. That’s when we end up feeling powerless, helpless, lacking control. Yes. And that’s what sends us to really high arousal levels. We’re never gonna be in a stress-free world. But having that range of tools and being able to choose and know these work in this situation, for me, these work in that situation, that creates a [00:42:00] tremendous amount of resourcing for your survival brain that automatically is going to lessen how much your system has to go into the arousal.

Michael: Well, I think the difference between that and how it was previously is if this would happen and it’d just be confusing, I wouldn’t know what’s happened. I felt outta control. Yes. And now I’m just like, oh. That’s that thing where my brain is shifting into a different state. Yes. And it’s not appropriate right now.

So I’m gonna use this tool and see if I can downregulate. Into a more healthful or appropriate state for this situation?

Elizabeth: Yes. What’s interesting for me is it’s not just that, before I understood this, I was sort of confused. I also had a bunch of habits that I’ve seen in many, many other people that I’ve trained since then, which is I would perhaps get anxious and I could tell I was anxious, but I didn’t really know what to do with it and mm-hmm I had all of these thinking brain.

Judgements and narratives [00:43:00] about it. Like, oh, this isn’t really a big deal, so and so has it so much worse than I do. I shouldn’t be feeling this way ’cause this isn’t a big deal. And all of those kinds of thoughts are sort of dismissing it or devaluing it or comparing it to someone else that actually makes the survival brain perceive even more threat.

And it makes it worse. And so I would actually accelerate it through these ways of coping. And it’s very common in our culture. When I talk to someone who’s activated, they’re often like, you know, this isn’t really such a big deal. I don’t know why I’m having this response. I should be over this by now.

I’m like, please don’t let your, your thinking brain have those narratives. It’s just making it worse. It’s not helping and it, I know your thinking brain thinks it’s helping. It’s not because your survival brain is perceiving that message as somehow. Oh, I, I’m really not on top of it because you’re having these thoughts and so it just creates this kind of antagonism between them.

So I wanted to mention that. ’cause I can imagine if [00:44:00] you have high achievers in this audience, they are probably having confronted that as well.

Michael: Okay. For somebody that’s listening and, and they’re like, I really wanna pursue this, what would be the next step or the next two or three steps? Obviously buy your book.

Maybe start there. It could take your course. Yes. What else could they do, like in terms of getting therapy or whatever, what would be the most helpful?

Elizabeth: So I would definitely recommend buy the book, or they could listen to me do the audiobook. They could go to my website, elizabeth stanley.com and join my mailing list and get the first.

Exercise in the MFI sequence. It’s a five minute audio recording guided audio instructions, and it is a practice of training the attention to help the survival brain perceive safety. So five minutes a day, they can listen to the audio recording and use the contact points exercise. They can participate in the course.

I both offer it on demand online through Sounds True, so anyone can do it at their own pace. They have [00:45:00] lifetime access. Or I teach it sometimes in person, sometimes online on Zoom, and we’re doing a live course starting, uh, we’ll do one this fall. We tend to do one a semester time, and in terms of body-based trauma therapists, on my website there’s also a tab, find a therapist.

They can go through there and find the directories. They put in a zip code or put in their country, city, state, or if they’re overseas. ’cause they’re all over the world now. There’s several different modalities and the two that I think are most aligned for people as a, as an entryway in to really do some of the body-based work, somatic experiencing, or sensori motor psychotherapy.

Those directories you can link to from my website as well.

Michael: By the way, just one pro tip I think is that when you’re looking for a therapist, don’t just assume that the first one you call is the one you gotta go with. Yes. I actually did three discovery calls. Therapist. They were like 50 minutes a piece and I just really wanted somebody that I connected with and the first [00:46:00] one totally didn’t disconnect.

I knew 30 seconds into it, this was not gonna be my therapist. The second one, fabulous. Third one. Okay. But I just, just, you could compare against.

Elizabeth: I absolutely am so glad you said that, and I think doing at least three discovery calls is a really, really good idea. I had a similar process when I was finding a person.

The most important thing about the therapeutic relationship is that your survival brain feels safe, and so, and it, it will be a very fast, very unconscious hit. And if you’re not really in touch with your body and your mind is trying to talk you into it. Weren’t in touch with your body. If your mind is trying to talk you into it for various reasons, that’s probably not the person for you.

But I’m really glad you said that, Michael.

Michael: A lot of times people say, listen to your body and this is where it makes sense.

Elizabeth: Yes, absolutely does.

Michael: Okay. I warned you about this segment. This is the, uh, fast round here where I’m gonna ask you what’s your biggest obstacle in getting the double win where you feel like you’re really winning at work, but you’ve got the [00:47:00] space to flourish as a human.

What’s the biggest obstacle?

Elizabeth: The biggest obstacle for humans, I think, is that they tend to be really great at focusing on intentions at work, but they’re not necessarily so great about thinking about themselves as a whole person and having clear intentions in their physical bodies, health and. Strength and flexibility and functioning in their relationships and in their spiritual life, whatever that is for them.

So my biggest recommendation, I do this every New Moon. So it’s about a 28 day period that works for me. I really sit down and lay out what do I wanna accomplish? What are the most important things, my most important intentions across those four different elements? And when I started doing that, it really meant for a much more balanced double win.

Michael: I’m assuming when you miss that for one reason or another, things don’t go so well.

Elizabeth: No. When I miss that, [00:48:00] I find myself getting much more flustered and much more kind of handling what is in front of me as an external deadline. Yeah. Which usually exists with work and all of those really important for the long-term peace and wellbeing and my long-term health and stability.

Those goals go out the window because I hadn’t prioritized putting them into how I’m going to spend my time.

Michael: Second question, how do you personally know when you’ve got the double win?

Elizabeth: I know I have a double win when I am waking up each day with a lot of vitality and joy. And when I am able to move through successive curve balls in all kinds of realms of life and just stay in this kind of easy state through all of it, that there’s just a lot less resistance to the way life is unfolding.

And I feel like then there’s a lot more flexibility to flow with it and without sort of going through these big highs and lows. And for me, I know I’m coming off of that when I [00:49:00] start going back into those stress reaction cycle habits.

Michael: That’s a good guideline. Okay, third and final question. What’s one ritual or routine?

It helps you do what you do.

Elizabeth: Hmm. I have a regular mind fitness practice every morning. Most days it’s, um, sitting or standing, but some days it’s movement. I wake up in the morning. First thing is check and see how I’m feeling. Do I need movement or can I do it as a, a seated practice at least 30 minutes?

And then I do at least 30 minutes of some journaling and writing that often then moves into my writing professionally later into the day.

Michael: Fantastic. Journaling is fantastic for me too.

Elizabeth: It’s, it’s great.

Michael: Yeah. Well, Liz, this has been extraordinary. Thank you for gifting us with this time with you, and I think our, our listeners are gonna find it super helpful.

And guys, I just can’t endorse widen the window enough. You know, that’s a book that you’ve gotta get because these are life skills now. In this kind of high pressure world that we have [00:50:00] got to develop or suffer the consequences.

Elizabeth: Michael, thank you so much for having me and gifting me your time. You are such an, an easy person to talk with and like you, I could have continued this for quite some more time.

I really hope that your listeners enjoy the conversation as much as I’ve enjoyed it.

Michael: Thank you. I hope we get to meet in person sometime.

Elizabeth: I do too.

Michael: Thanks again.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

Michael: Well, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Liz. There are so many takeaways and so many things I wanted to talk about that we didn’t have time to get to. But I think that some of what I took away and that you should take away is that if you’re suffering from anxiety or depression or some other psychological disorder.

You’re not alone. So many of us, I mean, literally every executive I coach, every executive I lead in our group coaching program, the double win coaching [00:51:00] program, maybe not every, but almost all of them struggle with anxiety and feelings of inadequacy, and they just don’t know how to deal with it. And I’m here to tell you that if your view of therapy is stuck in sort of the talk therapy mode.

Which mine definitely was. I thought that was the only alternative. There have been so many scientific advances in the last 10 to 20 years. It’ll make your head spin. And there’s real help for all of us. And the good news is, doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to go on for on and on. I was in talk therapy for 10 years and I literally can’t tell you what I got out of it.

And then I had somebody to talk to, which, you know, I suppose is something, but it’s not like going through. The kind of somatic experience therapy that Liz talks about. When I started with that therapist, I was in a very, very anxious state as a result of a faulty medical diagnosis, but within about 16 weeks, I had made [00:52:00] substantial progress.

There’s a special test. Called, I think it’s called the General Anxiety Diagnostic Test. And so my therapist had me take that at the beginning, and you rate yourself from zero to 21 in terms of how anxious you are, guys, I was a 17. That’s how anxious I was when I started Somatic Experience Therapy. When I finished 16 weeks later and my therapist released me, she said, I think you have all the tools you need now.

I was at a three. So that was substantial progress. And you know, granted on any given day, you know, it moves around, but I feel like now I’ve got the awareness and the resources I need to deal with it, which has been huge for me. And I think it’d be huge for you too. So I guess the first takeaway again, is realizing you’re not alone.

I think the second thing is once you learn a little bit about the science of it, and you don’t have to be sciencey or an academic, but once you just learn sort of the basics. You can begin to be [00:53:00] self-aware in a way perhaps you’ve not known before. So you can realize when you’re moving in and out of these various vagal states, whether you’re in that parasympathetic mode where you know it’s rest and digest and you’re in the flow and everything’s great, or it’s in the fight or flight sympathetic realm where you’re just mobilized for action and so many of us get stuck there.

Or in that dorsal phase where you’re basically just checking out. Once you’re gonna be aware of those different states, then you begin to develop the ability to move between them and really live a better, better life, a more peaceful, more joyful life. And then a final takeaway is I would really get the help.

You don’t have to live with chronic anxiety. You know, you’re not gonna solve the problem overnight, as Liz made clear in the interview. But you don’t have to live with this, whether it’s depression or whatever. I’m not saying that I know the solution. For your situation, but there’s help out there. I like to, to say to myself, a lot of times [00:54:00] somebody somewhere has figured this out and I think it really comes or is true when it comes to this very important issue.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. I hope you have some takeaways of your own. Let me encourage you, this would be a huge help to us if you would simply rate the podcast on whatever platform you’re listening to. And if you feel so inclined, write a short two or three sentence review and pro tip. Go ahead and put this in a chat.

GPT just. Dump into it what you like about the show and let Chad GBT polish it off and then post it. And that will help get the word out and help the podcast rank so we can get more people acquainted with the double win. So we’ll see you next week. Thanks.