SPEAKER_00: what percentage of chronic debilitating symptoms are alleviated with surgery or medication

SPEAKER_01: so surgery symptom the biggest factor keeping people in pain is anger but i thought anxiety and anger were psychological constructs it turns out it's just the sensations generated by your body when you're in fight or flight so i could most of our practice in two thousand and nineteen because i was so frustrated seeing so many people badly damaged by spine surgery i'm seeing so many people go to pain free with minimal cost no risk process

SPEAKER_00: if you or someone you care about is struggling with long covid or me cfs you are in the right place and you're about to hear one of the most eye opening and information packed conversations in the chronic illness space today we're diving into what's actually driving chronic symptoms not just physically but mentally and emotionally and spoiler although it's not all in your head which we always knew it is deeply wired into your nervous system through something we'll be exploring right now called threat physiology if you're new here i'm raylan eagle and the conversations you will find here are like no other in the chronic illness space because we explore all paths to recovery if it helps people heal we talk about it the goal is to learn together and help each other find a way out and today i'm thrilled to be joined by the incredible dr david hanscom he spent over thirty years as a complex spine surgeon until he realized he had to walk away from the operating room to help people truly heal from chronic pain and his own fifteen year journey with pain and many other symptoms led him to an unexpected discovery anxiety looping thoughts and unconscious stress patterns were actually at the root and once he addressed those he finally fully recovered and now he teaches how to shift from threat to safety physiology interrupt repetitive unwanted thoughts and work with the unconscious brain where most pain actually begins and according to him and so many other respected professionals in this field this approach works not just for chronic pain but also for anxiety depression and yes even me cfs and long covid so if you're stuck in fear loops if your body feels like it's always on high alert or if you're just exhausted from being told that there's nothing wrong with you when you know that something is my heart goes out to you and this conversation is absolutely for you so let's dive in dr hanscom wonderful to have you here thanks for doing this yeah

SPEAKER_01: thank you i'm excited to be here

SPEAKER_00: oh my goodness such a vast amount of knowledge and experience you have on this topic i can't wait to get into all of this i'm sure people would love to hear a little bit before we get into the details of all of this just your journey how did you end up doing this work that you were doing what's your experience been leading up to today

SPEAKER_01: well i'll try to keep this story relatively short but basically practice complex deformity surgery in seattle washington for about thirty two years and about four years four years into my practice around nine hundred ninety i was in seattle right across the five twenty bridge and at the time you know i was in my practice i was a young gun you know just going after it hard and i didn't didn't even know what the word anxiety was you know become a major spice or by having an anxiety and also in the five twenty bridge in seattle i had a panic attack what is this and i look it up i didn't know what it was and you know it's basically just regulated nervous system it's an ultimate anxiety reaction and from that point on for the next thirteen or fourteen years i cannot come out of this hole so i develop seventeen different symptoms of migraine headaches itching scalp skin rashes back pain neck pain can sleep ring in my ears and my whole nervous system sort of fell apart but nobody could tell me what was going on so part of it i went to counseling for like thirteen years psychotherapy trying to figure this out and things got even worse and it wasn't till two thousand two thousand and three things get extremely bad that it sounds odd but sort of gave up fighting i didn't know what else to do and inadvertently as you're not certain turned out sort of to be the answer because we're eventually learned that with the brain be so neuroplastic whatever you're fighting and trying to fix actually becomes reinforced thirteen psychotherapy which actually reinforcing the pain circuits not help them so bottom line is i q out of my also symptoms around two thousand and four and i've been pretty much symptom free for over twenty years and i never thought this past never thought this was possible and i came i went into it by accident i came out of play accident it to me about twenty years to figure out what happened the last five years who form a scientific international study group that she goes into the science of chronic illness and now i actually know it figured it out has been about a thirty five year quest to figure out what happened to me that day on the bridge

SPEAKER_00: and from all of your learning from what happened to you how does this tie into your work as the spinal surgery and how you then proceeded to approach treating patients

SPEAKER_01: was starting out interim medicine so he's to be has sort of a whole person approach right from the beginning so i always see a piece a few times before surgery or to make sure they get physical therapy medications etc still a pretty aggressive surgeon but a lot of the surgeries weren't working very well so seattle at the time i was there between run nineteen eighty six to nine hundred ninety five was doing nine times the rate of spine fusion per capita as any place else in the country and so i was part of that team i was enthusiastic i feel guilty if i cannot find a reason to do surgery and i started to think what i did but basically turns out we are operating on normally aging spines the success rate of doing a spine fusion back pain is about twenty percent is a big operation and i thought it was like ninety percent but i knew my results were as good as i wanted to one of them to be and my got mine up to about forty five percent but it was because of the surgery is because of the rehab so ninety ninety three in that paper came out i just quit doing surgery for back pain but i didn't know what to do so meantime i spiral into this deep hole of chronic pain and multiple symptoms and so i just sort of did the best i could not operate in nine hundred ninety nine i moved to sunny idaho in a private practice sole practice and i didn't have any resources so i started doing everything by myself and i knew that there are some tools that work in long story short i took a surgeon's approach to non operative care surgeons if you address sleep is number one people weren't sleeping we found out that lack of sleep out of study in israel so that lack of sleep actually causes chronicle back pain not the way around sure goes interesting so hard but the data also showed only five percent of surgeons were five in a physicians were actually addressing sleep so i started doing that i handed a little book called feeling good but david burns which is cognitive behavioral therapy i did have a psychologist and then david started to do some expressive writing so we started that people started getting better always to get physical therapy and rehab so that was in place i was still as medications and then would you not really in a clear way was life outlook so is jumping ahead twenty years it turned out that the biggest factor keeping people in pain is anger but i thought anxiety and anger were psychological construct in turns out it's just the sensations generated by your body when you're in fight or flight so you feel anxious your body says danger show you your fight or flight response starting if you can't solve the danger you can more a fight or flight response and you become angry so turned out anger and anxiety are physiological survival responses that we have no control over zero in a for my bruce lipton who is the author of the book biology believe put out really clearly we have zero control out of anxiety and anger and we now call it threat physiology and so anxiety is active physiology anger is hyperactivity through physiology and the problem with physiology your entire system fires up so your neurotransmitters in the brain go from calming to start a tory your stress hormones of course kick in place there's a little molecule in the bottle called cytokines as you all know little molecules that go from such from cell to cell there's inflammatory ones in profile tory ones in under fight or flight your entire immune system lights up and then cortisol drains fuel out of your body it's been known for fifty years that chronic stress breaks down the body i e chronic fighter flight so any athlete has to train then rest in order to regenerate if you're in constant stress fight or flight your body breaks down it turns out that every chronic disease with few exceptions are related to chronic stress that's mental and physical diseases so turned out the anxiety depression bipolar o c d and schizophrenia are basically metabolic inflammatory disorders really so critical is that this physiological response is about you know half a million times stronger than your conscious brain so your conscious brain unconscious brain processes about eleven million bits of information per second take us how much your process your conscious brain processes

SPEAKER_00: i couldn't begin to imagine

SPEAKER_01: forty so what were happening when you're in fight or flight your highest thinking party or brain the neocortex doesn't work so when you're running from a tiger you know thinking about philosophy in the human cortex is so big compared to other mammals that when the blood supply drops down in that part of the brain it really drops down and your thinking centers are markedly compromised and you're just reacting you're not really thinking and so says so much stronger than your conscious brain will use conscious control or conscious interventions or try to counteract that it's a mismatch you cannot do it

SPEAKER_00: this is fascinating i am so excited to hear you explaining all of this is so validating or us going through this to hear this coming from a physician from a surgeon from you know medical a scientific perspective because it can all sound a little bit that oh you're in all this pain you're you have a world of symptoms and you have to look at your emotions and you know this is your path out of this so i'm wondering how many other doctors in your experience are aware of this approach to healing in the in the latest science and embrace it and use it

SPEAKER_01: well i would say some i see very few surgeons i would say very very few surgeons and i was helping hundreds of patients literally go to pain free so my symptoms are gone and i fight out the science behind this and so i translated it into a book and a website no of course where people systematically go through learn the tools to calm the physiology and reroute it reroute the nervous system in the pain results and it happens hundreds and hundreds of times so i'm watching people being badly damaged by spine surgery with very expensive long term i mean really devastating results from best i surgery i was a guy who was trying to clean up the mess and it wasn't solvable most the time so i get somebody before they had any surgery at all it was just magical i can tell you some stories in a second but the bottom line is that's very self directed and i don't think as you go too much in the details of the course now because the idea is it's about learning skills so what's evolved in the last couple years is that the body knows how to heal you know sort of a trice saying but it's really true is in threat physiology your body breaks down right it was if you sustain it really breaks down and then weight lifters lifting weight he or she has to rest for the most muscles to go back up there was overtraining actually breaks your body down they think if your body's in constant fight or flight your body's going to break down so what happens is always through physiology again physiology is how the body functions in their city physiology with body rest regeneration heals so some ratio of enough safety compared to threat the body heals itself so the healing that occurs is far beyond what i can do is far beyond a self help process and not only do people go to pain free usually all the symptoms resolve and they thrive in a little possible that happens over in over and over again so i could most of practice in two thousand and nineteen because so frustrated seeing so many people badly damaged by spice or three and seen so many people go to pain free with minimal cost no risk self directed process you do not need a pain clinic to do this i said i had to quit so that was in two thousand nineteen i have not made nearly as much progress as i thought it would but all the medical fish is flat out digging in his heels that's a long answer to that question there is not buying it and the thing they ranch for a second we learn this in college actually learns in high school is the physiology class right temperature blood pressure heart rate all these things are in physiology class in college a little bit more in medical school we learned about the human body at a very very deep level and the physiology is where it happens because the body functions with physiology becomes ill when it dysfunctions so we're focused on structure and so the problem is we're just called medically unexplained symptoms by chance m u s sounds familiar well started out in two thousand and two in the failure practice literature you say well we know you've all these symptoms we kind of we can't find a source we call it medically unexplained symptoms was it terrible diagnosis because people give up hope ok they know it's going on there does the idea of the diagnosis was to acknowledge the fact that you hurt which is a start and we nothing we can do but can help you cope with it so that's wrong if we look at the physiology of stress and again stress is the problem coming in going to fight or flight because of stresses and threats you look at this is physiology of sustained stress everything is explained every single symptom i had is gone how can that be every cell in the body's bath in this chemical environment you know different organ systems have different functions so i migraine headaches they're gone but what happens is that the blood vessels of the brain get inflamed transmitters neurotransmitters are off and when you really regulate your physiology back to safety that goes away my ears were ringing tinnitus for many many years twenty five years i thought from construction work days and i do have some hearing loss it's gone is a renda symptom sounds sort of mild but the chronic really bothers you it's gone and the reason for that again i can theorize on it but it's gone lots of people in my course have had the tennis disappear but again fight or flight your nervous self has inflammatory cells your brain your brain itself is inflate so it takes less stress to set off this the sensations than the nerve connection in your body doubles so you have a hyperactive ear and receptive system in your ears ring my feet would burn like crazy especially at night that's gone skin rashes would pop up over my body that's gone and back pain neck pain that's gone so you say well how can that be physiology covers every cell in the body and if you come physiology all the symptoms disappear one person twenty four symptoms gone another gentleman had twenty surgeries and twenty nine surgeries in twenty years and his suffered it was just a huge mess of his life and he started work with my stuff about ten years ago and in about a year who pain free and ten years later he's living the best life of his entire life that's after twenty eight surgery there's two parts to healing one of them is to learn to your survival physiology is keeping you alive it's a gift so anxiety anger are gifts i mean how you survive without anger and anxiety we would not so you learn to separate your identity from these stress reactions is we take your identity in we take your stress reaction which are intended to be very unpleasant you take them personally you don't feel good and a lot of mental energy trying to compensate for this bad feelings was supposed to be bad so as you separate denny from the stress reactions and say look just take a thermometer visually on the other on the opposite wall and we feel really anxious angry and frustrated just visualize how high this morris going in you should use the tools to drop it down and so that's one part of it the other half is nurturing joy so again you can nurture joy if you're fighting stress not possible you can think you are in trying to distract yourself but it's such a mismatch it never works but if you try to run your pain stress physiology yes you reinforce it so we call it self induced deep healing as if you train your brain is a trained learned skills non positive thinking by the way which is another disaster but you sort of train your brain to be less reactive to the pain issue training to be less reactive is when you fight it you really reinforce the circuits we talk about it he reinforces circuits so you learn a common physiology and then when you're on then you do what you want to do so the healing actually occurs as you start living your life on your terms not by fighting the pain so i have little saying is quit fighting darkness and just turn on the light so it's a bit more complicated that but not much and i'll just be one example to one model here so we can maybe go on the the mental part of the conversation as far as these repetitive thought patterns but you know we came up with a model called dynamic healing so every living creature has sensory sceptors that takes input from the environment whatever environment that is you have the century input touch sound sight feel all these different sensations so those come into your nervous system and so you have your input your nervous system which processes all this and you have your output which is the physiology either threat or safety so there's ways of process your stresses differently so they have less impact on your nervous system there's ways of making nervous system going from hyper reactive to call and there is a physiology there's things you can dress lee learn the physiology on the input side of the good the goal is just more safety physiology so all these interventions come towards one goal so it's never one intervention solves a problem is a combination of just a life using different tools in your times of the day to calm down your physiology so for instance which you want to sample is if you're my office and you have chronic pain as you look when you walk in the office you'll never discuss your pain ever with anybody and because what's as input was input doing your physiology right so it is a bit deeper than there is just your physiology i'm sure never discuss your pain or discussion medical care no complaining no criticism giving unasked for advice and no gossip because what's it doing to your physiology right so that's one of the basic cardinal rules are simply no negativity and often we sure in some workshops back east those were a carnival rolls and it takes about six weeks actually slow that down because we all like to complain this is where we are and it's for hard especially the gossip part of people used to gossiping but it again fires a breath of physiology especially when you're in pain you are complaining about the doctors medical system there's illnesses you complain about when you're in pain and the are legitimate complaint but you want you do you want your brain on the problem or do you want to solution so this one example how we work on input for output for instance you probably have done this a lot with your clients where you do breath work like slow breathing stimulus was called the biggest nerve which is anti inflammatory or rubbing your forehead stimulates the fifth cranial nerve i'm sure the same fifth grain or in the forehead i actually took that little tool for my cat so i can call my cat down really quickly by rubbing her forehead so also sound there's some pitches of music that really stimulate the biggest nerve and actually causing to calm down issue lower the physiology is for is the nervous system itself you make it more resilient was sleep is number one you have to sleep diet you know to find her diet and exercise are the three big ones as far as the nervous system so your sister be call or hyperactive and sometimes you come from an abusive environment or system to be feel safe so i taking a feral cat and try to calm it down you can't talk to it you said to teach it how to feel safe so that's where the dynamic healing you have your input or stresses your nervous system or copy skills you have your physiology the output and we have threat physiology then you have symptoms so the root cause the root cause of illness is interaction between your stresses in your coping skills so we're treating only the symptoms so the root causes and we close being address so it's like trying to put on an oil well fire with a garden hose you know the fuel keeps coming up and you've got to go to the root cause by dealing with so when we teach people to learn these tools about ten or fifteen minutes a day that's it we try to really really learn about pain or really solve the problem you're actually reinforcing the pain here's learning tools that use every day all day long you should not be work because one of the end to those anxiety is play is you think sort of playful curious attitude towards it that really comes of the physiology that's whole different topic they were the bottom line is that in a killing motor you change the input you increase your nervous system learn to lower the threat physiology then the symptoms resolve themselves i covered a lot of ground there

SPEAKER_00: i was just thinking i think you've covered everything that i've been working to cover on this channel since it started we might just shut down the channel after today this is i think a mic drop moment

SPEAKER_00: you've explained it so incredibly well and light bulbs are just going off all over the place as even thinking with my own journey for my first couple of years i was really laid out and really symptomatic and then i decided for a year that i was going to stop trying to fix myself because i didn't know what else to do and i wasn't going to talk about it i made a rule because i was tired of it being my whole identity and it was interesting it wasn't the whole fix but in that year just by stop trying to fix it and never talking about it again i started to feel better

SPEAKER_00: one of a zillion little you know light bulb moments that were going off for me as you're talking about i think though i mean preaching to the choir here as well as to you know a lot of the people that watch this channel are pretty right up and up to speed on the science behind this but still understandably many have not been given this information or are just hearing it for the first time and it sounds a little bit off because i still hear every day from people i have all these symptoms i'm really struggling to believe that i'm going to be able to get rid of them all without surgery or medication so what was you estimate what percentage of chronic debilitating symptoms are alleviated with surgery or medication

SPEAKER_01: memory treating symptoms so surgery symptom and so my one pain of the body so to me a long time to figure this out so let's take back pain there is not operation should ever be done with back pain ever works the reason for that is first of all the same acute lumbar strain you strain your back and about half of people by the way this developing backstrain it goes on to be chronic so the m r i scans what happens there's a pain center in the brain lights up back pain in about six or twelve months actually shifts to the emotional center the same pain but a different driver is a definition of chronic pain is a embedded memory that becomes connected to more and more life experiences and the memory cannot be erased and it cannot these pain circuits are absolutely permanent is similar to phantom limb pain or leg is cut off here why is the pain still there the structures gone in so the brain if you think about this carefully every living creature to memorize everything all the time otherwise we don't stay alive you know when across the street we know we're not looking to the sun we know how to stay safe but your brain's taking it in if mission every second so which is really information it just ignores it because it's safe so the new comes up you have to analyze it but your brain memorizes everything but especially pain and so it sounds discouraging but he is the more you try to fight it and solve it the more you reinforce it so you really are going to get rid of these pain circuits you can walk through them you walk past them you can transcend but you can't fight them and so what you're doing is you learn to separate yourself from your pain in the first thing that happens by the way with mental pain and physical pain is that you change your relationship to the pain is the pain she or you're here

SPEAKER_01: as you start getting on with your life the way you want to your terms that's the solution it's really is so from neuroplasticity standpoint by the way neuroplasticity i'm sure knows it we do not i didn't know this medical school i'm sure we even knew it back in medical school but your brain changes by the second we thought that the brain was static in sort of lost cells as you get older and it changes every millisecond so even right now both of our brains have changed and so what you're doing you're trying to direct the brain to change the direction she want and that's why if you start living life that you want and you quit fighting the old one that part of your old brain starts atrophy so the circuit is still there they can be triggered any time but they really attribute the point where they just don't bother anymore so it's consistent one example right now again i don't know if the eyes comprehensive depression o c d bipolar his metabolic inflammatory disorders they're not psychological so in zari is the term we use when you're fight or flight so it just describes humans have this description for fight or flight who calls it just a descriptive term is not a psychological diagnosis she learned to live with it be with it i don't like to embrace it but you do embrace it because it's part of keep you alive he just go on your way

SPEAKER_00: we talk a lot here on the channel about the conscious brain and unconscious brain so what is the relationship between those two and why is it important to understand that when it comes to chronic conditions

SPEAKER_01: well chronic disease is a state and dr navio at mitochondrial has shown that you have chronic illness is motor connect they don't heal she actually shift that state before you actually can move forward if you use an acute interventions for economic problem it doesn't work so what you're doing is learn how to calm down physiology and then move forward you know so the question was exactly what again

SPEAKER_00: understand it we talk about some things happened in our unconscious brain and other things we happen in our conscious brain and we need to bring things from the unconscious to the conscious there i just i think it gets a bit confusing for people understanding the relationship between the two and you know how this relates to their symptoms and their recovery

SPEAKER_01: so the unconscious brain keeps you alive we do not need conscious brain to stay alive so we use conscious brain you have to be careful because you know animals have consciousness also right our animals look at things analyzing decisions but they don't have thoughts they don't have language to put meaning to it so they still respond if we do not have a new cortex we still stay alive chimpanzees have ninety nine point nine percent of the d n a we do you have quite a bit of intellectual capacity but they don't have this huge neocortex so remember the unconscious brain is eleven million bits of your patient per second the conscious brain is forty that's it so you can't control it and so it's like trying to drag stir with handbrakes dr work with a conscious brain does it gives you the steering wheel you can steer and direct it wherever you want so your conscious brain will react to whatever you put into it again if you consciously decide to complain to be negative that's what's going to happen your conscious brain is respond to what you put into it so it's a forty bits of information per second eleven million you decide what you want to load into this thing if you're put loaded negative you have a massive survival reaction and so the other thing is that this is been also eight hundred which i'm really disturbed about his house on a couple weeks ago but if you see somebody dangerous walking across the street your body actually responds first before you have thoughts it's the actually physiology first so it's about a one to ten second delay your body automatically reacted by the time you think about it so let's have a thoughts for second new book on repetitive i wanted thoughts and so what i learned in my own experience is i have full blown obsessive compulsive disorder which is marked by really extreme intrusive thoughts and most people don't have that but just by definition the way the brain works and this is where i think humanity's going to come up this different solution for this is that your threat physiology creates unpleasant thought because what happens you're the conscious brain is interpreted the sensations made by your unconscious nervous system we call it intraception so if you're buying fight or flight your conscious brain gives different meanings to these sensations you know as an in the same or a negative words you know sad shame embarrass all these different things are meanings we give to a physiology so the way your brain is working is that your your physiology creates the unpleasant thoughts then the thoughts themselves become input that actually strikes up the physiology this very bi directional and so after a while with repetition the thoughts become embedded in different triggers always fire the physiology vice versa so if you're anxious frustrated for any reason you're from negative thoughts then the negative thoughts can also become their own input so this one part is by directional that's very unique to humans so we're through unwanted thoughts or rumination why ninety five percent people ninety five percent of people have these things about seventy percent of people have a lot of destruction lifestyle i had extreme form showing about two or three percent population of extreme intrusive thoughts really negative really negative with all the physical symptoms i had the two worst parts my deal were these repetitive thought patterns they were just horrible so by the way is also direct relationship between thoughts and suicide actually attempted suicide miss whole thing and what drove me to that was the thoughts they just would not stop so i noticed over the years of people's pain would disappear their anxiety would drop and these thought patterns spinning away so forcefully my experience they actually disappeared they're gone but i could figure out why and so you have to understand is that there's a four part process when these thoughts so the miracle i just start with is that of a hornet's nest where the nest river is your system or your brain in the horse or your thoughts you know somebody shakes the nest the hornets are pretty unhappy is what we're doing right side fighting these hornets which is making them more angry the real interest which shaking the nest so the four parts of solving this pattern says number one separate from the thoughts that's where my friend is conducted behavior therapy comes into play if you heard six size call expressive writing if you work with that much so that separates you from the thoughts not solving them to say thought separation process and then the nervous system so the first of a separate from your thoughts calm physiology the third part destroy i mean dissolve your ego and the fourth partner plasticity so thought separations of first part where you learn to express and look at him mindfulness is the same thing you simply the thoughts are here you're here in common physiology is a stylish healing model we change the input the nervous system the output and what you're doing is mostly around anger so people are angry about a lot of things they always have been particular this day and age with a lot of sensory input we're overwhelmed or frustrated we feel trapped and when you're angry your nervous system is really fired up so there's a bunch of tools i call it anger processing to calm things down is sort of beyond the scope of this discussion but calm physiology does actually critical so physiology drives the thoughts in medicine we're not addressing the physiology so do it in the summer of carnita processes to deal with these thoughts in not even the root cause at all the third part which made you know just go for this discussion that we develop an ego for a couple reasons one of them is our stress physiology is unpleasant it's just feel bad so we develop this story about ourselves to feel better about ourselves second of all we're mostly programmed by negativity right

SPEAKER_01: we're raised by criticism do this do this should do this shouldn't do that so we're sort of programmed through our lifetime with negativity so we develop our own internal story about ourselves to feel better and then the third reason is we're competitive species like every other creature so we want to look good so we spend a lot of time building up this appearance to other people but also to ourselves to look good it takes a lot of mental energy to do that so on top of that we suppress negativity so the suppressed thoughts emotion really fire up this whole process or ruts and then it develops into mental what's called mental rigidity which is cemented in my anger is this really fixed view of yourself it's not solvable that's where conspiracy theories come into a big play with these thoughts about life in general that this and this so rigid thinking is a huge block to healing is a huge block to treatment you get a certain mindset and it's not so it's not changeable so that's the challenge we deal with now is if you're open to actually engaging people heal but the key issue is people don't believe it you mentioned earlier well what if you talk about this people don't buy into it well it's a problem so i ask people don't believe me so when you leave this podcast or tv show don't believe anything i said the key is connect to what's in there which is skepticism so i said you don't have to believe anything and david hanscom or the process or whatever it is believe that your body knows how to heal so connecting with what is is a huge factor so connect with your skepticism is actually the starting point you start doing the work now letting your brain start to change then the fourth part where the healing actually occurs we talked about this before you separate from your physiology over here because you nurture joy good food good wine good friends your brain develops that direction that's the definitive healing it's not by fixing the negative side it's by nurturing the good side so with these thought patterns you got your thought separation call the physiology the driving force the third thing which has to happen relatively quickly is kill your ego you don't need it you understand your three physiologies over here you're not taking it personally you don't need an ego it's a ways to think about it so think how much time we spend with me being king of this how much time we spend build up an appearance that we think is okay so that takes mental energy that my cat doesn't spend time with so you know she just gets what she wants anyway so she doesn't need an ego

SPEAKER_00: so that goes so i'm thinking about the people listening watching and i think there's a tendency for people to think i'm somehow going to be the one person that this doesn't apply to so for people who learn what this is about who implement strategies who follow this course of moving forward i mean what percentage of people would you estimate that this could be beneficial for for people with these chronic symptoms

SPEAKER_01: well i'll tell you that i don't know all i know that depends on this repetition so it depends how committed you are to learning the skills the focus is on the skills not believing so usually calm your physiology and let your body heal the hardest part of this project by far is people can't help but try to fix themselves and when you do that of course your attention's on the problem so we learn to be with the problem and then move a different direction so if people engage is a high percentage heal but it may take a week usually obviously being three to six months of repetition is a key issue here and it takes a while to learn how to play the piano learn how to become a professional at anything and people might say well i don't want to become a professional oh really i mean you basically become a professional at life skills so we're not being the highest level professional learn how to rig your physiology so i'll just give you one example i mean i have a lot of people in there the thought patterns are a little bit something i'm learning i mean it's really tough to break through these thought patterns as far as the pain and anxiety that can drop down relatively quickly i'm on a learning curve as far as the thought patterns but one gentleman who i saw a couple months ago he's a friend of a friend now i'm not in clinical practice so i can give guidance so he was having surgery recommended a normal spine who's like a long spine fusion international he was suicidally depressed so the data has shown forever again the whole process evolved of just just by trying to follow the research about what we're supposed to do so none of this is something i made up or invented or some magic formula is just following the science so the data even if i didn't know any of those clear back forty years ago you don't operate on people that are suicidally depressed you just don't do that well that's being done all the time now and so that operation in that circumstance would have put him in and this is what it would show my practice so it started the process that i'm working on about six weeks ago i talked to a couple days ago his mood is way better depression is lifted he's not suicidal the pain is still there but he doesn't react so much which is always the first thing with pain that is there doesn't bother you as much eventually as you keep going different direction informing new circuits in your brain those new circuits don't have pain so people do go to pain free and it's better repetition and learning tools but again we call it deep self induced healing if you allow your body be a state of physiology your body heals itself so this might be confusing but i'm going to try anyway there's a concept of self help versus deep healing so self help helps symptoms and if you contribute contributed to healing but the idea of self help is i want to learn enough tools i want to be really good about processing pain because i want less pain the pain of the show so inadvertently self help processes tend to reinforce chronic pain so deep healing is learning to not react to the pain be with the pain and then go a different direction so letting go the fixing process is really challenging that's probably the biggest step is letting go

SPEAKER_00: this is incredible i'm just thinking this is a lot of information for people watching listening so if you're feeling like i think maybe i retained ten percent of that don't worry watch it again i'm already thinking i'm going to have to go back and replay this and i'm wondering what resources what information what do you have available for people who want to learn more about this from you and get some support on their journey

SPEAKER_01: so all my resources are on my website back in control com one word and then on the front page there there's a lot of resources we put up some books which really just nice summaries of the situation just to really a simple start to it i have a book back in control a surgery on a chronic pain and then i have a course called the doc journey direct your own care journey it's a computer based course and i recommend people spend maybe about ten or twenty minutes a day on it that's it it shouldn't be work should be curiosity what's going on look at it as just learning skills it's very self directed then i coach twice a week and tuesdays and thursdays at noon on a zoom call and so the coaching myself is not effective if you add the coaching to the course is very effective and so then i have all sorts of videos and blogs and probably too much stuff on the website but the core between the flip books the course the coaching is sort of in the book back in control get you started on what you're going to do incredible yeah

SPEAKER_00: okay well make sure to have that all linked in the video description so people could check it out because you have hit the nail on the head for that all the key things that the experts that i bring on this channel talk about and explained it just also concisely so for people watching listening to yourself a favor take a moment look at some of those links because you know he's got the experience the knowledge and clearly a wonderful person so some really great resources there to make use of on your journey and i'm also going to link if you're watching this and this is resonating i did another interview with dr howard schubner you might be aware of so i'll link that up on the screen as well if people want to check that out it's just really incredible and really validating to have so many knowledgeable physicians coming forward and speaking about this and just validating the experiences of people going through this because for many years so many of us felt lost and or told it was all in our head or we were just being lazy or maybe making it up so this is impact just not only the validation but also tools a path forward you can get better

SPEAKER_01: howard schumer is a good friend of mine he's my mentor oh and we play golf together we stay each other's houses and stuff so he's wonderful he's very academic he keeps doing the research on it and he's really really wonderful

SPEAKER_00: yeah he i've only interviewed him the one time but i just thought the world of him and he is another one who is just really changing so many people's lives it's it's incredible the work that people like yourself and him are doing thank you so much for being here i really appreciate this every sentence of this has been gold truly valuable i really appreciate it dr

SPEAKER_01: thank you i really enjoyed our time

SPEAKER_00: thanks to everyone for watching and listening and hope to see you in this next also incredibly information packed interview with dr howard schieffner
