M1 : Lesson-2 : Chronic Stress and Limbic System Impairment – Brain to Body Stress Cycle
If you missed my previous mention of THIS ARTICLE, it’s a great read highlighting the need to target the brain to shift immune function.
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Do not use our information to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any physical/mental/emotional disease, or as trauma treatment, or as a substitute for the advice of a health professional.
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Transcript
Agile 1 lesson 2, chronic stress loops in the brain and the body. In lesson 2, we’re gonna learn more about stress science. Specifically the brain’s stress response cycle and the relationship to the autonomic nervous system of the body. We’ll learn about how the limbic system in vagus nerve relate to this stress cycle and why regulate is both a top down or brain to body and a bottom up body to brain approach to nervous system health. This will be another deep dive science section let’s get through it and I think it will help you to understand why we need more than brain retraining alone when it comes to regulating our nervous system.
First, let’s begin by learning a little bit about the amygdala of the brain. The interpretation of stress begins in the brain. When someone is confronted with danger, your eyes, your ears, even your heart will send information to the amygdala which is in your limbic system of the brain. This area contributes to emotional processing and memory association. There’s other brain structures that contribute to the stress response, but we’re gonna focus on just the main structures of threat activation right now, which is the amygdala.
The amygdala interprets images, sounds, and even our internal biochemistry always deciding am I safe or not safe? Is this like a threat from the past or is this okay? When it perceives danger, it will instantly send a distress signal to the hypothalamus. In a chronic stress response, the amygdala can start to overreact to incoming inputs and sensory experiences. Especially if there’s a history of a toxic or traumatic injury to the brain.
This is when the limbic system can become overreact dive in its function. The amygdala and the limbic system structures are no longer appropriately able to discern a normal level of threat in a situation, and the limbic system impairment often leads to nervous system dysregulation. Limbic system impairment, when the brain is stuck in an overreaction stress and threat mode, often the root cause behind many chronic conditions that do not resolve despite treatment. If you suffer from some of the health conditions mentioned in the introduction. It’s imperative you learn about a limbic system impairment, and how to reset your threat perception filters of your brain.
For me personally learning this science and applying the methods of changing how my brain processed information was the single most impactful treatment in my chronic illness and mental health healing journey. In this program, we’re going to focus on patterning the response of our limbic system to triggers so that our body can calm down. Simply put, your limbic system becomes overreactive and creates stress responses as fuel or motivation to protect yourself and this is often unconsciously done. Meaning, we don’t even have time to think about this reaction with our rational brain. And sometimes the limbic system is just trying to protect us from the past, like a scary thought, and sometimes even a past infection.
The limbic system is often also trying to control our future experience. Understanding this motivation of the limbic system that is just trying to protect you, often from something it’s associating with from the past is a crucial aspect of breaking the chronic stress response. In fact, in module 4, the brain retraining module, you’re gonna learn how your memories have a big factor in the symptoms you’re actually currently experiencing. When you understand the science and the irrational motives of the limbic system to keep you in stress, You can consciously choose to break the cycle, and rewiring your brain helps you to do so. I’m gonna attempt to drive the relationship to the stress response in the body in several ways in the following sections.
So that you have a very clear understanding of what is happening, why it’s happening, and what you can do to shift your chronic stress response by targeting both the brain and the autonomic nervous system in the body. So let’s take a deeper look at how the stress response is processed in the limbic system. Your hypothalamus is your limbic system command center. It coordinates and controls so many body functions It’s responsible for managing your mind body connection. This area of the brain communicates to the rest of the body through your autonomic nervous system, nicknamed ANS.
Your amygdala is responsible for processing emotions and memories associated with fear. And your hippocampus is a learning and memory center of the brain. Think of the hippocampus as the part of your brain that puts a time stamp on your memory so that you can categorically know what memory happened and when. Next, let’s look into what the autonomic nervous system does. The autonomic nervous system keeps the immune system, the digestive system, and the endocrine system running properly.
The autonomic nervous system has 2 branches, the sympathetic nervous system, and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system functions like a gas pedal in a car. It triggers the fight or flight response providing the body with a burst of energy so that it can respond to perceived dangers. And then there’s the parasympathetic, which is much like the brake pedal of a car. The parasympathetic triggers the rest and digest response, helps the body calm down and return to normal after a threat has been dealt with.
Produces dose chemistry or dopamine oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, and is regulated by the vagus nerve. In this next slide, I’m going to show a sequence of how the limbic system directly impacts the body through sending messages of safety and stress. You’re also gonna understand how the body impacts the brain by also sending the brain messages of safety and stress and this is what creates a chronic stress loop when this does not get interrupted properly. First of all, starting with the amygdala, When the amygdala gets over reactive, it can go into that threat and stress mode, which we often refer to as a limbic system impairment. And when that happens, it’s triggering the hypothalamus constantly that there’s danger.
And the hypothalamus triggers the autonomic nervous system to send stress hormones throughout the whole body to respond to the perceived threat. So now your body is on high alert because the autonomic nervous system is what’s relaying stress hormones and messages and this is all being regulated and modulated by your vagus nerve. Then the body is also sending stressful messages all the way back up to the brain, to the amygdala. The amygdala perceives threat again, and we get stuck in a brain and body stress cycle. I have a whiteboard video to explain a little more about this brain body stress loop to give you a better perception of what I’m just scribing.
You’ll see that we have a top down or brain to body stress signal, and we have a bottom up or body to brain response to the stress signal. And this is why in regulate, we will focus on both a top down or brain retraining approach and a bottom up or vagus nerve and somatic approach to teaching you how to regulate your nervous system. The Olympic system, and specifically the amygdala, interprets incoming information from inside or outside the body as threat or non threat. The amygdala tells the hypothalamus what it is interpreting. The hypothalamus sends commands to the autonomic nervous system in the body of how to respond.
The autonomic nervous system then either activates the sympathetic fight or flight or the parasympathetic rest and digest circuit in the body. The body is now either acting out this safety or stress response depending on what the brain and amygdala initially decided. The loop then completes itself as the body sends messages of safety or stress back to the brain to be interpreted again. This loop is drives the top down brain to body signaling of a stress response, and the bottom up body to brain communication of threat or danger. To stop the chronic stress loop, we need to interrupt the stress signal in the brain and in the for best results.
Hopefully, you have a clear understanding of why we’re going to approach both the body and the brain in this program. I know this is a lot of science, and we’ve got a lot more to go. It will make sense over time. I just want you to have a clear understanding of why taking the time to do both bottom up practices and top down practices is a in helping to heal chronic illness. In the next lesson, we’re going to dive deeper into Olympic system impairment and some of the indicating factors of that.
So I will see you again in the next video.