Ep. 255: nukes & nervous systems

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome friends. Welcome friends. Hey, welcome to Jackal Graves. Welcome. [00:00:10] Speaker B: You're given guests here. [00:00:12] Speaker A: So welcome. So pleased to have you. So delighted to have you along. Wonderful episode lined up today. Just ah, always such a treat when Eileen Marx Nelson joins us. Just she's almost become a part of what makes Jack of all Graves the podcast it is right. Having access. Not almost absolutely 100% just having access. The privileged access that we have to the scientific insight and just the academic fucking scientific credibility and rigor that Eileen lends what are often some poorly researched notions on my part. Right. [00:00:57] Speaker C: True. [00:00:57] Speaker A: I'm self aware enough to know that I a lot of sometimes. [00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:04] Speaker A: So it's very very very just such a boost for us to be able to have Eileen on from time to time to, to give us that, that just that lovely little shellac veneer of credibility and believability and authority. So Eileen, it's wonderful to have you. I would super briefly like to just start this week's episode with just. It is a very deep sadness, a very very deep sadness that as of this week we must speak of Catherine o' Hara in the past tense. Is that not. [00:01:45] Speaker C: Man, we are starting on a saddest. [00:01:48] Speaker B: Yep. [00:01:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I, I was worried that we weren't gonna, that we were gonna forget and I have to just bring this. [00:01:54] Speaker B: No, I'm glad. [00:01:55] Speaker A: Right at the start. Yeah to early 70s, 71 I want to say is no age. True. And I, I'm not gonna speak on it at length because I will go because I have go this week. I'll, I'll, I'll go. So it's just an absolute deep tragedy that we, we from here on in must speak of her in, in the past tense. [00:02:19] Speaker B: It's. No, I, I was thinking about it and I shed many, many tears over this in the past week. But I was thinking about it and I was like I, I think Catherine o' Hara was my favorite actress. [00:02:30] Speaker A: Like is that right? [00:02:31] Speaker B: When I think it through I'm like, I'm pretty sure, you know, because I've, I watched Guffman and Best in show and you know all that stuff religiously. You know how many times I've watched Beetlejuice and Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. Which you know, if I was like, you know, I gotta just put on Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice and just think of her on the Soul Train. That's where, that's where my brain is. You know a lovely little send off there. But yeah, I was like I can't think of an actress that Like I, you know, obviously, Moira Rose, now you're in the club. You've been watching Schitt's Creek. [00:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm up to the end of season two, and you're right, it's a delight and just keeps getting better. It just gets better the further through it you get. [00:03:11] Speaker B: It's the rare show that is like, it doesn't lose steam. It gets better every single season. [00:03:16] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:03:16] Speaker B: It's like, holy shit, how are they doing this? [00:03:19] Speaker A: They are there. I don't know. I don't know if it's the same for you too. Right. But for me, they're a very, very specific, often as simple as just one particular fucking line of dialogue that can. That, that, that you. You see at a young age and never leave you. Just the intonation and the beautiful way that it's delivered. [00:03:39] Speaker B: That's all of Beetlejuice for me. [00:03:42] Speaker A: Well, it's, it's. It's Sally's song from like May Before Christmas. Right. And when you think of this character that she is embodying through her voice, this. This woman pieced together, almost fully formed, with no youth to draw from, no life memories to remember, just conjured into being through leaves and stitches and rags. But the way she just intoned that one line, the worst is just around the bend. Oh, man. As a kid, that never left me and it never will. And it's again with deep and sincere sadness that that news happened this week. It was horrible. She would be missed, sorely missed. And despite all of the cool Christopher Guest stuff and the Tim Burton stuff, she was still do acting against type. She was great. Yeah. The last of us. Still fucking expanding her range and expanding her profile and finding new ways to connect with new audiences. That in that stage of her career, it is an absolute fucking awful, awful, awful loss. And I'm super gutted by it. So with that said, and on that wonderful happy note, welcome to another joyous fucking all singing, all dancing, all crying episode of your favorite podcast. Basically the only one at this point that matters, really. Jack of all graves. Welcome, friends. [00:05:09] Speaker C: Indeed. [00:05:10] Speaker B: And listen, we've got. Eileen's gonna kick us off now that we've. We've gone through that and we're all suitably sad. [00:05:18] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:05:19] Speaker B: So, Eileen, you are gonna address this week some questions from Mark. [00:05:25] Speaker C: Yes. Okay. Okay, what do you got? [00:05:30] Speaker A: All right, just. Just let's go broad to start with, right? Because just as I've been pottering about the house today, a few things have occurred to me. [00:05:38] Speaker B: Poor Eileen has, like, prepared an open here and you're all ready to derail it, like, hold on, I have more questions. [00:05:45] Speaker A: There's nothing here to prepare for at all. These are just, you know, there's probably like a simple yes or no or mock, don't be such a fucking idiot kind of question. [00:05:52] Speaker B: Do you want to let her, like, tell her stories first and then maybe. [00:05:56] Speaker A: Yeah, go on. [00:05:57] Speaker B: You have questions. All right. I mean, okay, let's start there. [00:06:04] Speaker A: Because book era, right? And because of the very tenuous and febrile world, geopolitical, ever changing, shifting, tectonic plates at the moment, Right. Nuclear calamity is front and center of my mind. Right. It always is, really. I. Yeah, you do always think about that. I've often had thoughts of nuclear war within my mind. And having just read Nuclear War, a scenario which I spoke of last week and which maybe I'll read a little bit from later. I've, I've. I've been really fixating a lot on were I to be outside of like, the mile or two blast radius of a nuclear impact. Right. And I were to be in maybe like the fallout zone where electronics were burned out and, you know, livestock and growth farming land was all fucked. But I was, I. I'd survived the initial blast. What could I expect to happen to me physically? And what would be some of the processes that would cause whatever it was to happen to me? And how long might I expect to live for? And how badly would I wish to not be alive anymore? [00:07:33] Speaker B: Right. [00:07:34] Speaker C: Okay. So thank God. What I have prepared should actually to some degree answer that for you. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through three separate cases where there was a nuclear accident at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. [00:07:58] Speaker B: Oh. [00:07:59] Speaker C: May or may not be familiar with. [00:08:02] Speaker B: Judging by that phase. [00:08:03] Speaker A: Are you going to talk about Louis Stolen? [00:08:08] Speaker C: Yes. Yes. [00:08:10] Speaker B: That was where your bookmark was in the book. That's amazing. [00:08:15] Speaker C: And I don't know. I've never read that book. I don't know what that book says. But I will walk you through what I was able to find. Basically three different employees having a nuclear accident. They were somewhat similar in that they are all from plutonium. So all from what you would be exposed to if you were to be exposed to an atom bomb going off. Okay. And then walk you through kind of the symptoms that they had before they all, spoiler alert, died. They basically all played radiation roulette and lost. So the first one is Harry Daglian. He was a physicist, worked at Los Alamos. He started the year after it was founded. So the year is 1944. The year where his accident happened was actually 1945. So 21st of August, 1945. So of interest and context, this would have just been a few weeks after the US Dropped bombs on Japan. [00:09:10] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes. [00:09:11] Speaker C: And this guy is a criticality expert. Do you know what I mean when I say criticality? [00:09:15] Speaker B: Not a clue. [00:09:15] Speaker C: Okay, so criticality is just studying the conditions under which, like, something can go critical. And so this guy is studying a plutonium core very similar to the ones that would have been dropped on Japan. [00:09:29] Speaker B: Right, so this is your worst case scenario guy. [00:09:33] Speaker C: This one isn't the worst. [00:09:35] Speaker B: I meant, like, in terms of what he does as a job, right? [00:09:37] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, like a lot of the stuff that I read as I was, like, looking at these first two guys, they're both physicists, they both worked on the Manhattan Project. They're like, oh, he was such. So personable, so nice. And I'm like, fuck that guy. I don't. I don't care. [00:09:52] Speaker A: I mean, look what he. Exactly the same thing. [00:09:55] Speaker C: Yeah. So I'm like, okay, sure. But anyway, okay, so both this guy and the next guy were kind of experts in criticality, and they both were working on this type of experiment that I've seen described as tickling the dragon's tail. Oh, so what he's doing is precisely. [00:10:12] Speaker A: How my book phrases it. [00:10:13] Speaker C: Yes, perfect. What he's trying to do is he's trying to get this plutonium core as close to going critical as he can without actually letting it go critical. And Harry Dagley's research, he was trying to use these tungsten carbide bricks, and he was using them as a reflector. So basically, plutonium will emit some neutrons, and if you put the right type of metal on the outside, it'll reflect it back, and then you need less plutonium to go critical. That's the simplest way of describing it. So he's trying to use less plutonium and still get the same, you know, boom. But he doesn't actually want it to go critical. Like, he just wants to get as close as he can and. And. And show that he can use as little plutonium as he can. That's how I described it or how I understood it, not how I described it. I describe anything. I am not a physicist, so. Okay, so Daglion, according to a couple of my sources, did something you should probably never do if you're working with plutonium cores or any other, you know, Any other hazardous material. And did he eat it? No, he worked alone. [00:11:20] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [00:11:22] Speaker C: Yeah, so one of my sources said he actually finished up his work day, went to dinner, and then came back. And the only other person there was, like, a security guard not even standing near his experiment. Thank God. Another just said he chose to work alone. And apparently there were no safety protocols against this, which I guess makes sense because it's 1945. [00:11:39] Speaker B: Right? Yes. That's what's the whole thing, really. [00:11:43] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:11:44] Speaker B: Regulations are, you know, written in blood, Right. Things don't happen until you up. [00:11:50] Speaker C: Exactly. Whenever I do safety stuff with my kids in the lab, that's what I call my students because I'm so old now. [00:11:56] Speaker B: I thought you meant your literal kids. [00:11:57] Speaker C: No. Oh, wow. I'm talking about grad students in their early 20s. [00:12:01] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I do the same thing. [00:12:03] Speaker C: Yeah. I'm always explaining stuff to them and they look so bored. And I'm like, listen, I'm telling you this because someone did it. And that's why. That's why we have to talk about it now. [00:12:14] Speaker A: Every fucking Christmas, Right? Every Christmas when I have to use a Phillips head screwdriver to take off the battery cover from a toy, I think it's because some fucking idiot kid ate a battery. That's the only reason I have to. [00:12:24] Speaker B: Probably many idiot kids ate batteries, realistically. [00:12:28] Speaker A: Yeah, true, true. [00:12:31] Speaker B: So he's working alone. [00:12:32] Speaker C: Okay, so he's working alone. He's stacking up these metal bricks around his plutonium core. And of course, he's got monitoring equipment set up. And just as he's about to put that last brick on, he notices. Oh, oh, oh, I better not put this on here. I'm getting readings that tell me that this is going to go critical if I put this brick on. So he goes to move it back, but he must have been flustered or something. [00:12:55] Speaker B: He. [00:12:56] Speaker C: And he drops it right in the middle of his experiment. [00:12:59] Speaker B: No, he dropped it. [00:13:00] Speaker C: He dropped it right in the center of his little tower of bricks and exposed himself to a whole shit ton of radiation all in one go. So he immediately grabs the brick and tosses it off, but it's essentially too late. Like he's already been exposed to that. [00:13:17] Speaker B: What is he. While this is going on? And I don't know if this would have come up in whatever you read, but what is he, like, wearing while this is going on? [00:13:26] Speaker C: I have no idea. Although I saw some illustrations from. I'm not sure if it's Louis or Louis Slotin. Slotin. I'll call him and he was just wearing like office wear suit. [00:13:38] Speaker B: So not in like a shirt. [00:13:40] Speaker C: Like. [00:13:41] Speaker B: Yeah, he's not like Monsters Inc. In it. He's not in like a radiation suit or anything. He's just a guy at work. [00:13:46] Speaker C: I didn't even see pictures with like lab coats or anything. [00:13:49] Speaker A: Crazy. [00:13:50] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:13:50] Speaker B: Okay, so nothing between him and blast of radiation here. [00:13:54] Speaker C: Yes, of course in his mind it's not going to go critical. [00:13:57] Speaker B: He's going to get it close. Of course. What could possibly go wrong? [00:14:02] Speaker C: Yeah. What, what, how could this be a bad thing? Okay, so a couple things about the type of radiation. So this would be ionizing radiation. So there's non ionizing and that would be stuff like visible light and then there's ionizing. And what makes it ionizing is that that radiation has enough energy to remove electrons from atoms and the non ionizing doesn't. So all that it means is that it can knock electrons out of orbit. I kind of think about it like, I don't know, molecular whack. A mole, that radiation can just pop the electrons out. So what's the problem? Well, if you're a person, the problem is, is that at like the molecular level, it's essentially breaking your DNA. [00:14:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:14:43] Speaker C: So that's why we're worried about ionizing radiation and plutonium specifically. Like when it's not going critical, it's something called an alpha emitter. But when it goes critical it also emits neutrons and gamma rays. So what's the difference? So an alpha or a beta, which is what my lab works with is emitter is something that's non permeating. So basically it's not going to get past your skin is all right. [00:15:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:15:09] Speaker C: Whereas gamma rays and neutrons do and can get in and get to all your lovely internal organs and mess them all up basically. [00:15:16] Speaker B: So. [00:15:17] Speaker C: So I think one of the reasons why they're not wearing stuff when they don't expect something to go critical is that they're working with something that in theory shouldn't be able to get past their skin. However, when I work with radiation, I do wear a lab coat and gloves because technically it can still affect my skin. I don't know like what the radius is for plutonium, like how far the alpha waves go. I know that for some of the radiation that we work with it's just mere millimeters and for some it's like nine inches. So certainly if I am working with it, I'm within 9 inches of it and I don't really want. [00:15:47] Speaker B: You're close enough to Drop a brick, then you're right. [00:15:49] Speaker C: Right. [00:15:50] Speaker A: Do you mind me asking, under what, under what kind of circumstances do you work with radiation then? In the day to day, what kinds of work are you. [00:15:58] Speaker C: Oh, my lab. Okay. [00:15:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:16:00] Speaker C: So none right now. We haven't used it in like three years. But what we did before we lost funding for that type of project and are still trying to get funding back for it was radio labeling studies. So we were working with like radio labeled glucose or radio labeled mannitol. And my boss has this whole setup that he has created where, you know, you can inject radio labeled glucose and then you can kind of see where it goes and look at the like metabolic response. He has a fancy name for it, but. [00:16:30] Speaker B: Right. [00:16:31] Speaker C: You know, so the students do that. They, they can do it in vivo or ex vivo, and then you can see where the radiation ends up. Or the amount that's in the blood is what we're particularly interested. Or the amount that's taken up into muscle tissue that's sitting in a dish. So that's the kind of thing that he's doing. And you can. Those type of experiments are really accurate. Right. So if you radio label something, you can measure the radiation pretty exactly. Whereas a lot of the other stuff that we do in the lab, it works with stuff like antibodies and there can be issues with binding. It's not like as. [00:17:08] Speaker B: What would you be like, what are you looking for when you do that? Because I know I've heard of this before, like the idea of radio labeling and whatever. But what is it like, what are you trying to find when you do that? What does that show you? [00:17:22] Speaker C: So, like, for him, if he sees, I can't even remember which way it goes because the students are the ones who usually do it. But if you get more radio labeled glucose, then it indicates that, you know, maybe their glucose handling is not great, you know. [00:17:35] Speaker B: Okay, got it. Like, so you're testing. It's kind of a way of seeing like levels of X thing. [00:17:40] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:17:41] Speaker B: What it does in the body. Right. Where that goes and what it does shows you how something is functioning. [00:17:47] Speaker C: Exactly. Okay, got it. For us, that's heat stress's effect on metabolism. [00:17:52] Speaker B: Right? Okay. Yeah. [00:17:53] Speaker C: So, yeah, so that's what we do. But yeah, I haven't worked with radiation much at all. I'm the safety officer. I have to do all the safety stuff. But the student whose project it is usually does the experiment and I just try to make sure they don't spill it on themselves. [00:18:10] Speaker B: Fair enough. [00:18:11] Speaker C: Yeah. So, all right, what was I. [00:18:14] Speaker B: So he drops his brick. That's where we are. [00:18:15] Speaker C: He drops his brick. He's exposed to these waves that can permeate his body. The same thing would happen to you if you were within range of a bomb and he was exposed to. I saw anything from 400 to 500 rem. So rem is just. It just is a measurement of how much radiation you received. And it takes into account both the energy exposure from the radiation and the medical effects of that type. [00:18:42] Speaker B: Okay. [00:18:42] Speaker C: So over 100 rem, you're likely to get something called acute radiation syndrome, which I think Mark is basically what you're asking about. You're asking about what happens to your body, what you're exposed to enough radiation. And so for acute radiation syndrome, you need four things. You need a lot of radiation. You need it to be exposed to most of your body. You need it to be the penetrating type. And you need it to happen over a short period of time. And that's what happened in all three of these cases that I'm about to talk about, or am already talking about. And for Harry Daglion, it was well over 100 rem. And also, I couldn't find something that said over. This is lethal. Okay. So I found anything from 300 to 1200 ish rem. And I'm guessing that's because maybe the amount that's lethal has changed since 1945. [00:19:36] Speaker B: Sure. [00:19:37] Speaker C: I'm not entirely sure, but every single source I looked at had a different. [00:19:43] Speaker B: Well, and I'm sure it's probably dependent right? On, like, what it is, how you're exposed, things like that. Right. It's probably not like a flat number so much as 100%. [00:19:54] Speaker C: And your unique physiology would also contribute. Yes. [00:19:58] Speaker A: And lethality over time as well is instantly lethal. Plus, maybe it'll kill you in a month or two. [00:20:04] Speaker C: Right, right. And all the cases I'm talking about not immediately lethal. So this guy lived 24 days. Okay, balloons. [00:20:14] Speaker B: I know. Great. Mark's laptop was like, yay, 24 days. [00:20:21] Speaker C: He was also 24 years old, and the first. [00:20:24] Speaker B: 24. [00:20:25] Speaker C: He's 24. He's fresh. 24. [00:20:27] Speaker B: In the lab by himself, around with radiation. [00:20:32] Speaker C: Yes. Amazing. What a guy. Anyways, he's the first person that I found to die from this type of criticality accident. And the information that I could find about what happened to him was a little bit limited. But what I found said that he removed the brick with his right hand. And so his right hand was very affected. His whole hand was blistered. Snails turned Blue. His both hands and his, like, whole abdomen turned red. It's called erythema or something. It's a skin rash, almost like a sunburn. [00:21:02] Speaker B: But, like, from, like, close encounters. [00:21:04] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So. And then over time, his hands and his abdomen began to swell and the skin started to just, like, slough off in layers. [00:21:14] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:14] Speaker C: And, yeah, by the time he died, he had slipped into a coma. He was basically skin and bones, and he was missing most of his skin from his abdomen and lower chest. And they said his cause of death was severe burns. [00:21:29] Speaker B: Burns. That's one way of putting it. [00:21:33] Speaker C: And I'm like, well, sure. [00:21:36] Speaker B: So this is from sort of your description of what's happening here. This is the result of, like, an attack on his DNA. It's an attack on his atoms being broken apart. [00:21:47] Speaker C: Yes. [00:21:47] Speaker A: Did you say it was electrons being knocked out? [00:21:49] Speaker C: Electrons being knocked out. [00:21:51] Speaker B: Whack a mold. [00:21:51] Speaker C: Yes, yeah. Whack a mold. [00:21:53] Speaker B: The result of that is the skin coming off, essentially. [00:21:57] Speaker C: Well, in his case, yes. In his case, probably because he's standing right next to it. And the part of his body that got the most radiation would have been his hand, followed by his, like, abdomen and chest. So that's what happened for him. Let's compare his case to Sloten. So Slotin's also a physicist, also works at Los Alamos, started there the same year as Harry Daglion. He would have known him. He would have been friends with him. He would have known exactly what happened in his case. I want you to know all of that before I describe how he set up his Tickling the Dragon's Tail experiment. [00:22:28] Speaker B: Okay. Even the name of it is just like, hey, this is a bad idea. [00:22:34] Speaker C: Right? Yeah, I know. Right? Okay. So he was also an expert. He'd done this many times. And when this specific incident happened, which was on 21st of May, 1946, he was actually showing who the guy, Alvin Graves, who would be his replacement, around the facility. He had decided he's going to stop doing this work. He's going to go off and do something else. And reportedly, Graves was like, hey, is that the setup for tickling the dragon's tail? I've never seen anyone do that. And Sloane's response is, sure, I can do this in just a couple minutes. Let me show you. And unprompted, he sets up his experiment for him. He was using two half spheres of beryllium. So beryllium is a really strong but really light metal. He was using it for the same purpose that Harry Daglion was. He's using it to reflect neutrons back on the same. The self. Same core, Exact same plutonium core. And ordinarily, when someone did this experiment, there would be some shims in place to keep the two spheres from touching, because if they close, that's when it goes critical. And the whole purpose of the experiment is to get it as close to criticality as you can without actually letting it go. But Slowden is known as being sort of like, you know, a little daredevil. [00:23:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. [00:23:55] Speaker C: And so he doesn't like working with the shims, so he decides take the shims off. And the only thing preventing these two half spheres from coming together and causing, you know, a nuclear event is a screwdriver. That's what he likes to use. [00:24:12] Speaker B: Jesus. [00:24:14] Speaker C: And his boss, which would have been Enrico Fermi, reportedly told him he would be dead within a year if he kept doing this. And he was not wrong. So if physicists count for your deadpool mark, he would have been. He would have got a point. [00:24:27] Speaker B: Yep. [00:24:30] Speaker C: So I think you guys can see what's happening here. He removes the shims. He's just using a screwdriver to keep these. These two metal, I think of, like, bowls apart. They come together because the screwdriver slips and him and everyone in the room gets exposed to radiation. He's standing the closest, so he gets the biggest brunt of it. I had told you it was around 400 to 500 for daglion. For sloadin, it's 709 REM, so quite a bit more. Thankfully, no one else died. He's the only one who died from this incident. [00:25:05] Speaker B: They earned it. Yeah. And just. Just real quick, when. [00:25:10] Speaker C: If. [00:25:10] Speaker B: When this is. This happens, these fears come together again. I don't know if you would know this if this is described in any way, but, like, what. When that occurs, is there like a boom or like a flash or like anything? Or is it just kind of like a. Oh, fuck, we just did that. Like, how do they know they just suddenly turn sunburned, you know? [00:25:30] Speaker C: Well, you would know pretty quick, but I don't. I don't think that I remember hearing anything about a noise. But they do reportedly, like all both of these incidents, there's like a blue flash or, like, flash of light that people. That people see there can be a boom. But I didn't remember reading about it with either of these, so I'm not sure. [00:25:52] Speaker B: No, that makes sense for it to be. Yeah. Your flash of radiation. [00:25:56] Speaker C: Yeah. Although it's worth noting that, like, under A certain amount, you would just have no idea that you were being exposed to radiation. [00:26:03] Speaker B: Because that's why, like, you know, you could, like, I mean, now, I guess you can generally, but if you're walking around like Chernobyl or something, you can be getting all irradiated but not know it. Right. Like, it's just kind of there. [00:26:13] Speaker A: Report I have here on Slotin says that eyewitnesses described a quick flash of blue light, a blue glow and a wave of intense heat. [00:26:21] Speaker B: So no sound, just. [00:26:23] Speaker C: So. [00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah, just. [00:26:26] Speaker B: Like being microwaved. [00:26:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:26:29] Speaker C: Okay, that makes sense. Heat makes sense. What I read mainly focused on the blue light, but I would believe it. Yeah, for sure. Okay. [00:26:41] Speaker B: Everyone in the room gets. [00:26:42] Speaker C: Yes, everyone in the room. So that's. I think it's seven people, plus him, including Alvin Graves. [00:26:49] Speaker B: What a jackass. Like, at least if you're gonna do something, like, super dangerous, be like, hey, guys, you wanna. You wanna leave the room for a minute? [00:26:58] Speaker C: Apparently, like, he talked to one of his colleagues. And now I'm just trying to remember and write anything about it, but one of his colleagues, he was, like, joking back and forth with, and that colleague after the incident said something along the lines of. That everyone gave their, like, approval by just the fact that he talked about it. And they didn't leave. Right. [00:27:15] Speaker B: So they knew it was coming. They didn't leave the room. Implied consent. [00:27:19] Speaker C: Yeah. And they probably would have been in the room with him doing this other times. [00:27:23] Speaker B: Yeah. It's not the only time they've experienced the screwdriver sphere. [00:27:27] Speaker C: I still think it's stupid, but, like, dumb as fuck. [00:27:30] Speaker A: But what this account that I have here also claims is that while everybody else evacuated because he knew that he was fucked, because he knew that he'd taken on the most and was basically walking dead, he stayed behind and did a really detailed kind of sketch of the room of exactly where everybody had been standing, exactly how the experiment had gone wrong, exactly what order people would have been irradiated in so that the other scientists in the room could understand the cascade of how radiation poisoning would then go on to affect everybody else. So he was trying, I guess, scientists to the end. To the end, yes, to the very end. [00:28:14] Speaker C: I'm going to probably call bullshit on that. [00:28:17] Speaker B: Oh, interesting. Okay. [00:28:20] Speaker C: I think that what that book is getting wrong is that it would have been one of his colleagues that did that. Because let me tell you, I don't think this guy would have been in any condition to do any of that. [00:28:30] Speaker B: Okay, go on. [00:28:33] Speaker C: Like, I mean, I'M not saying it's wrong, but I am kind of saying maybe that's accurate. From what I read, the guy that he was joking with maybe came back in later and did some of the stuff. I wish I could remember that guy's name. But. Okay, I'm not sure. I won't. I won't say it's definitely not true. But from what I read, like, right after this happened, Slotin did immediately, like, knock the top sphere off. He apparently tried to block the people near him from it with his body, which would not really do anything because it's waves. And I'm like, sure, okay, maybe it's not a grenade. Yeah, exactly. And then he just goes, well, that does it. And it's like, indeed it does. Because this man would have literally watched, like, okay, not watched, but he would have known, like, what happened to Daglion literally not even a year before in a very similar situation. [00:29:32] Speaker B: Right. So he knew what his fate was about to be. [00:29:35] Speaker C: Yeah. And this guy only took nine days to die. Okay. And we actually have a lot more information, or at least I was able to easily find a lot for more information about what happened to him. And again, everyone else in the room did not die. His replacement had like the most damage and was in a pretty critical state for a bit, but recovered. Everyone else, I think, was far enough away that, like, maybe it's thought that maybe it contributed to cancer later or something like that, but they didn't have any, like, immediate super acute, you know, no one was worried they were going to die. Sure, immediately. But yeah, from what I read, it said that Slotin, like, pretty immediately had a burning sensation in his left hand. That's the hand he used to knock apart the spheres. He vomited on the way to the hospital. And his condition quickly worsened. When she got there, we're talking about, like diarrhea, swollen hands, blistering all over his body. And then there's actually a letter I found that was written by Phil Morrison, who would have been someone else who worked at Los Alamos. And he's writing to some colleagues about the course of Lewis's illness. And I'm just going to read part of it to you because I can't paraphrase it better. And he says the course of Lewis's illness was like this. The first few days his hands bothered him. He experienced one or two attacks of nausea. This would have been after those initial symptoms. We were all, however, as cheerful as we could be. And I think that the only thing striking, only the striking parallel between his condition and Daglion's was a cause of great worry to him. On about the fourth day, his rather good clinical condition, temperature and pulse normal, hands in slight pain, began to worsen. He had a very severe involvement of the stomach and intestines which amounted to complete stopping of their functions and resulted in severe discomfort from swelling and gas pains at this time. Also, he began to show a fever which remained above 103 from the fifth day. He also describes a picture of what's happening with his white blood count. And instead of reading it, I'm just going to paraphrase it because it's very technical. But basically what they found is that in the first couple of days his white blood cell overall count was fine, but he had a really low number of lymphocytes, which are one of the types, of course, that fight infection. And then by the fourth or fifth day, it's just all of it's tanking. The total white blood count is tanking until by like the sixth day, the medical staff are pretty much saying, this is hopeless. Like, this is. This is not a good time. And what bothered the person writing the letter, this Phil Morrison guy, was that he also saw a steep drop in platelet count. So basically what's happening to this guy is he's no longer really got a functioning immune system and he also can't stop his blood. Like if he has an injury, he's not going to clot. [00:32:14] Speaker A: Coagulate. [00:32:15] Speaker B: Yes, yeah, yeah. [00:32:16] Speaker C: And this person specifically mentioned that they saw a good deal of like sharp drops in platelet counts after Japan. [00:32:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. Yes. [00:32:26] Speaker C: And then on the day that he died, the ninth day, they did an autopsy and they open him up and basically they think that his cause of death, his immediate cause of death, was fluid from his stomach aspirating into his lungs. They thought like, maybe his diaphragm's not really working so much and he just had like so much like swollen and fluid filled organs that this guy says it was pure and simple, a case of death from radiation. Right. [00:32:55] Speaker B: Okay. No burns this time, Just. Yeah, he had them. [00:33:00] Speaker C: But like he had so much other stuff that that's not really so much what they were concerned about is how I read it. [00:33:05] Speaker B: It's so interesting, like the difference. I mean, maybe part of this is that we don't have as much information about what happened to the other guy. But it does seem like these were very different deaths hit with the same thing under very similar conditions, but how it impacted their bodies was different. And that's really Interesting. It's not like, oh, this is what happens to you. It's like, depends. [00:33:27] Speaker A: Well, I'm very happy to share some details. [00:33:30] Speaker C: Parameters. Yeah. Okay, go on. [00:33:33] Speaker A: So as the end drew near, Slotin was experiencing necrosis. Death of the limbs. All the bone marrow stem cell throughout his body were now dying or dead. Experiencing necrosis of the blood vessel walls. Jaundice, acute thrombosis in the small and large blood vessels. Severe epithelial damage in the intestines. As his body began losing its ability to form antibodies, the cell lining in his gastrointestinal tract began giving off products that began moving into neighboring tissues. Right, so you're quite right. He basically is guts digested the rest of him, but he's. I'll skip a little bit. Right. Not long after he took his last breath on day nine, Los Alamos doctors began slicing him open, eager to learn how radiation kills a human. Doctors came across a horror not observed in the world before the invention of the atomic bomb. The mess inside Slotin's dead body was like a sea of rotten soup. His blood was uncoagulable. At autopsy, one of the doctors wrote in a classified postmortem report, the radiation poisoning had caused the near complete loss of tissue that once separated one of his organs from the next. Without this lining, his organs had merged into one. [00:34:47] Speaker B: Wow. [00:34:47] Speaker A: It was basically a blob inside a blob of real body horror right there, coagulated into itself. Wow. [00:34:55] Speaker B: I mean, the idea that you said at the beginning there, Eileen, of the, like breakdown of the atoms really makes all of this make sense, you know, it's. It's a body wreak configuring itself. And you can see how it's doing that. It's like, it just makes me think of like the end of. Is it this X2 with the guy, like the senator, whatever turns into water, right? It's like just like a complete rejiggering of like. [00:35:22] Speaker A: I always love that effect. FYI, early, whether that was early 90s or late 90s, the CG and that bit always blew my mind. [00:35:31] Speaker C: Classic. [00:35:32] Speaker B: Classic. But. All right, go on. [00:35:34] Speaker C: Right, so. So why I'm telling you these different cases is in part to highlight that, like, there is some physiological difference. And so honestly, like if we were three standing around a plutonium core and it went critical, we were standing the same distance and we got the same amount of radiation, it would probably still be some variability just based on what your body does. [00:35:53] Speaker A: So incredible. [00:35:55] Speaker C: And that's true for almost anything that can happen to a Person, like, sure, well, that's heart disease. It might not be the same as if you did. You know, like, it can present differently because of a lot of factors. It's very complicated. But there is, like, there are certain things that are always involved or often involved at certain levels of radiation. And there also is a disease progression, which I think you couldn't see in Harry Dagley's, that you can see in Lewis's, and you can see in the next person's. Okay, so after that, I'll break it down for you, but we'll do one more example. This example is a little bit different. We're going to also fast forward in time to 1958. We're still at Los Alamos, but this time we're not looking at a physicist. We're looking at a chemical operator named Cecil Kelly. So Kelly would have been a very experienced industrial worker. So he would have been like a technical expert more than a theoretical scientist. Right. And he'd worked there for over 11 years. He'd been doing this exact procedure that I'm about to briefly describe for about half of that time. Like, he didn't do anything differently than any other day. So what I'm trying to say is this guy is not an idiot. And those are kind of like, this is not. [00:37:05] Speaker B: Yeah, he's not being reckless. [00:37:07] Speaker A: Tickling the dragon's tail. [00:37:08] Speaker C: Reckless. He was not tickling the dragon's tail. [00:37:10] Speaker B: No dragons. [00:37:11] Speaker C: He did not wake the dragon up. [00:37:12] Speaker B: Right. [00:37:14] Speaker C: He was just doing his job. And what his job entailed or one of his responsibilities was doing a process that would retrieve plutonium from liquid waste. So basically, they take the liquid waste containing the plutonium and they put it in this big old tank with a bunch of chemicals that are meant to purify the plutonium back out of the solution, if that makes sense. [00:37:34] Speaker B: Kind of like a plutonium. Huge type situation. [00:37:39] Speaker C: A plutonium. What situation? [00:37:40] Speaker B: Centrifuge. [00:37:41] Speaker C: Centrifuge? Yeah, kind of. Because the tank has, like a stirring mechanism, and that was part of it. So it's in there. What's in there? With, like, the normal chemicals that there would be. Put the normal amount of plutonium in. And he starts the stirring. And he is standing on the outside of this tank on a stepladder, looking into a viewport to give you some idea of the scale of this thing. [00:38:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:01] Speaker C: And within seconds of him turning on the stirrer, there's a muted boom. And he's the only person in this room, but there are other people in the next room who heard it and they come running. By the time that they came running, he had fallen or been knocked off of the stepladder, and he had got up, he turned off the. The stirring, and he had run outside. And so they found him outside the building. And he's having trouble controlling his movements. That's called ataxia. So, like, he just can't control his limbs. He seems, like, super confused and disoriented. And he just, like, is having trouble standing up. And he's just repeating, I'm burning up, I'm burning up, I'm burning up. And that's all he's saying to these people. And so they thought that what happened to him at the time was like a chemical burn, not radiation, but like that maybe one of the chemicals he used in the process got on his skin. They said his face was flushed. So what they did is what you're supposed to do if you had a chemical burn, which is put him under a safety shower. Then they called the nurse and the supervisor, and it took them maybe a good 20 minutes or more to figure out what had happened. And by that time, he would have been on his way to the error. [00:39:17] Speaker B: So, and I'm assuming you do not do this for radiation. You don't put someone under the shower. [00:39:25] Speaker C: I mean, I doubt it hurt anything. [00:39:27] Speaker B: Right. [00:39:27] Speaker C: It's just not gonna help. [00:39:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:29] Speaker C: Because this also was, again plutonium. So he's been exposed to the. The waves, you know, they've already gone through his body and done the thing. You can't wash it off. They didn't go on. You can't wash it off. [00:39:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:41] Speaker C: So within 10 minutes of this explosion, the nurse would have arrived. Within 25 minutes, he's being admitted to the ER. And around that time, it sounds like, is when they started to figure out what might have happened. And they didn't even look for, like, gamma radiation at first because they didn't think that with what he was doing, there was any chance that there could have been something like this. He was working with such a small amount of plutonium in such a diluted manner, they were like, how could this have happened? And so it took them a while to even try to look for gamma radiation. And then when they found it and they found it next to the tank, they were like, oh, oh, shit. And I don't know how long it took them to figure out exactly what happened, if that happened before or after he died. But his course was more like this. So by the time the nurse and the supervisor got there, he was unconscious. Then by the Time they got into the er, he's kind of like semi conscious, but he still doesn't have any clue what's going on. His skin was almost starting to turn like a purplish color. He was clearly in a lot of like abdominal pain and his eyes were red. Although he said they didn't bother him. He kept retching and vomiting liquid. He was hyperventilating about 10 minutes after he arrived at the hospital. He had anti quote, explosive diarrhea. [00:40:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a common feature. [00:40:56] Speaker B: Maybe just like you're like innards, like your colon breaking down. Yeah, right. [00:41:03] Speaker C: His blood pressure dropped. He had a super fast pulse, he had chills and he was jerking around so much, possibly from the ataxia, that they actually had to restrain him to be able to do things like take his blood pressure because they just couldn't get it otherwise. He had a fever of 103. Within a few hours, he's doing a bit better. He's no longer as disoriented. He seems kind of emotionally stable. He's still experiencing abdominal cramping and stuff, but doing a lot better than he was at first. And his white blood cell situation will probably seem kind of similar. By six hours, he doesn't have very many lymphocytes left. And at 24 hours, they apparently did a bone marrow biopsy and they found like very few cells in his bone marrow. It's just like very watery is how they described it. [00:41:49] Speaker B: Jesus. [00:41:50] Speaker C: About 30 hours after he was exposed, he took a sudden turn for the worse. He had a worsening of his abdominal symptoms. He was very restless. They ended up sedating him, which only helped somewhat. He's sweating, his pulse is irregular, he's turning blue. Like his lips specifically turning blue even though he's on oxygen. And eventually he slips into a coma from which he never wakes up. And he dies at about 35 hours. So he clearly got hit with more radiation. Yeah. [00:42:23] Speaker B: And. [00:42:25] Speaker C: So what happened here? [00:42:27] Speaker B: Yeah, how did he. Working with a small amount normal thing, like what, what occurred. [00:42:34] Speaker C: Right. And like I said, they really thought that like radiation exposure wouldn't even be a possibility here. But what they didn't know is that or what. Okay, so here's what they did know. They did know that every time they use this huge tank thing, they got a little bit less plutonium out than they put in. And they thought, oh, it's probably just going down a drain. Like, oh no, it's fine. And I can sort of relate. I mean, I think I would be a little bit more worried about where the plutonium went. [00:43:03] Speaker B: Like, I'd wanna. I'd wanna know. [00:43:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I'd want to know. But it is pretty much like a standard. Like, you never get out exactly what you put in anything. Right. So I'm like, okay, maybe I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Okay. But spoiler alert, the plutonium was not going down any drains. It was just apparently building up in one of the layers of liquid inside this tank this whole time. And I honestly don't understand how they could not know that. But if they. [00:43:31] Speaker B: Right. [00:43:32] Speaker C: Like, if they weren't testing for. I feel like you have to. I don't know. Anyway. I don't know how they didn't notice this level of plutonium. [00:43:39] Speaker B: This is the constant thing when it comes to, like, looking at the past from a lens now of being like, how many safety procedures we've put into place that you're like, why would you have not checked? Like, there's just simply no way that no one would have checked, you know? But again, it comes from the disaster. [00:43:59] Speaker A: It's unconscious incompetence. You don't know what you don't know. [00:44:02] Speaker B: Right. You know what I mean? [00:44:03] Speaker A: You only learn this stuff when people start liquefying. [00:44:06] Speaker C: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it was estimated that at the time that he had this accident, there was maybe 200 times the amount of plutonium in there that they thought that. [00:44:17] Speaker B: This is what's in it. Oh, Christ almighty. [00:44:20] Speaker C: He's putting it. [00:44:20] Speaker B: That's not a small amount. It's a lot. [00:44:23] Speaker C: It's over three kilograms of plutoniums. Yeah. That they estimated was in there. And so what they think happened is when the stirrer was turned on, it pulled all the plutonium, which was like, maybe a little bit more distributed in this layer into one spot in the middle of, like, that little stirring vortex. And the conditions were just enough for it to go, you know, boom. So this poor guy has done this for years. [00:44:52] Speaker B: Right. It's not, like, a safe job as far as anyone is concerned. [00:44:56] Speaker C: Well, if you think working with plutonium is safe. [00:44:59] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. On the scale of things that are going on at Los Alamos, yes. Safe job. [00:45:05] Speaker C: Fair. [00:45:06] Speaker B: You're not balancing spheres on a screwdriver. [00:45:09] Speaker C: No, no, no, no, no. Not like that. So this poor guy. Anyway, the amount of radiation that he received, the. Again, the sources were not the same, but I saw everything from, like, around 40 to 100 gray. So that would be 3,600 to 10,000 REM. So those other guys were hundreds of REM. And this guy is thousands of REM, no matter what way you slice it. [00:45:35] Speaker B: Jesus. [00:45:37] Speaker C: The poor guy. [00:45:38] Speaker B: So, yeah, I already told you, it's surprising he didn't melt on contact super quickly. [00:45:44] Speaker A: Just for my own context, is rem. What is REM short for? [00:45:48] Speaker C: Oh, I have this in here somewhere. [00:45:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you might have said earlier, but I don't remember. [00:45:53] Speaker C: I probably didn't. I think I just told you what it was because it's okay. Annoying name. [00:45:58] Speaker B: It's not easy to look up either. There's a lot of other things that are rem. [00:46:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:46:04] Speaker B: I know. [00:46:04] Speaker C: It's equivalent man Ron. [00:46:08] Speaker A: Of course. [00:46:09] Speaker B: Yes, helpful. Helpful. [00:46:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember that from Chernobyl. [00:46:12] Speaker B: I can see why you didn't bother telling us that. [00:46:15] Speaker C: Yeah. Sometimes I'm just like, does this matter? [00:46:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Is this going to convey any information? No, no, it's not. [00:46:23] Speaker C: So, yeah, so. So let's talk about, like, what's happening to these guys. [00:46:30] Speaker B: Yes. [00:46:32] Speaker C: So I told you. It's called acute radiation syndrome. You can also just call it radiation poisoning or radiation sickness. And from, like, a clinical perspective, it has four sub syndromes. And what that means is there's four parts of the body that are involved. Can you guess what they are from what I've told you? [00:46:47] Speaker A: Let's see. So soft tissues, intestinal tissues, kind of softer. [00:46:51] Speaker C: Internal organs, gastrointestinal is one. [00:46:54] Speaker A: Yep. [00:46:55] Speaker B: Blood. [00:46:56] Speaker C: Blood, yeah. So bone marrow, but yes, that is calcium. [00:47:00] Speaker A: So teeth, bones, not bones. Nails, hair, keratin, skin. [00:47:08] Speaker C: So cutaneous would be. [00:47:10] Speaker B: I thought he said that. Wait, what did you say before? So, oh, you said, like organs. Said bone marrow, skin. [00:47:15] Speaker C: So bone marrow, GI tract, cutaneous. And the last one I think you would probably not get. [00:47:21] Speaker B: Okay. [00:47:21] Speaker C: Because from these is neurovascular. So in that case. So only Cecil Kelly could have possibly had something like this happening, based on what I've read. Because it's kind of like the more radiation, the more likely you are to get each thing up the scale. So the first is bone marrow. Seems like even at low, low, high doses of radiation, low amounts for acute radiation syndrome, the bone marrow part's always going to be involved. You're always going to have blood be obliterated. You also often have skin that one isn't really related to dose, like your whatever. [00:47:57] Speaker B: Right. You're gonna get that kind of burn. [00:47:59] Speaker C: The burn, yeah. But if you get enough, you're gonna have more GI involvement. I mean, everyone we saw had GI involvement. [00:48:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:48:07] Speaker C: And then only in, like, high cases, maybe 2,000 to 5,000 rem or higher. You would get this neurovascular, and people don't even actually know what's happening, but their guess is that you're getting leakage from the blood vessels into the brain and that the fluid, like, disrupts your brain function, basically. [00:48:26] Speaker B: So is that why he was like, he like. Or what they think of why he was, like, shaking and confused, had no idea what was going on. Right. [00:48:32] Speaker C: So the ataxia and the confusion and all of that, probably that's their. That's a guess, right, of what they think is happening. So if you get a super high dose like him, you usually die within 48 hours. And with lower doses, it's usually going to be days to weeks. [00:48:51] Speaker B: I mean, it all comes down to sort of that there's like, no good way to, like, die from radiation. Like, if you don't, if you're not in the immediate blast and you just die on contact, even if it, you know, you get a few hours or whatever, it's going to be the most miserable few hours that anyone has ever experienced. [00:49:11] Speaker C: Mostly, yes. You will suffer for sure. [00:49:15] Speaker B: Just all these different systems of your body all at once, just like, dismantling and. [00:49:21] Speaker C: Yeah, that's horrific. And they do. They all follow four stages. So the first is what they call prodromal. So that's like, usually nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, loss of appetite. The skin burns start to show up. This wasn't really a thing with any of these. But you can have respiratory distress, the headaches, confusion, disorientation, the ataxia, fatigue, sweating, fever, low blood pressure. These are all things that can happen. And you can kind of tell what the dose was like, based on which things people get in this prodromal phase. Like, if you've mainly got, you know, vomiting and abdominal cramps, that's not so bad. But if you've got diarrhea and low blood pressure and a fever at this stage, that's all she wrote. Like, you're not. You're probably not making it through. Then they almost always go through a latent phase. So we feel kind of okay, right? [00:50:21] Speaker B: Yeah. It seems like there's like in each of these stories you told, there's like. [00:50:24] Speaker A: A stabilization might be. [00:50:25] Speaker B: All right. [00:50:26] Speaker C: Yeah, you got like, maybe the prodromal is a couple hours, and then the latent phase is a day or two or maybe hours in the case of like, a really high exposure, like Cecil Kelly. But in most of the cases, it would be maybe a day or two where you're feeling all right. You're like, maybe I'll be okay walking off Cruel. Yeah. [00:50:45] Speaker B: Like, oh, good. Yeah, maybe everything's going to be okay. Psych. [00:50:49] Speaker C: And even though you feel okay, you probably still have quite a few symptoms. It's not like the burns go away. Everyone still seemed to have like abdominal cramps, even though they were no longer experiencing like as bad of GI distress. And they still like often in this phase is when you start to see the white blood cell stuff start to happen. And so all that's happening, but maybe you just feel kind of all right. And then you get the manifest stage and that's where it all hits and they all like took a turn, you know, and you can have all sorts of stuff. It's just whatever you had in the prodromal phase, but worse pretty much. [00:51:27] Speaker A: Right, right, right. [00:51:29] Speaker C: Yeah. So worse GI stuff worse. If you had an involvement in your lungs, you would get radiation pneumonitis, which to me just sounds like an inflammatory reaction in your lungs. And you have like worse respiratory symptoms. You can have worse symptoms with your confusion and not understanding what's going on. And your ataxia and not being able to control your movement. Your white blood cell count is going to plummet. Your platelet count is going to plummet. You're probably going to have bloody diarrhea. The bloody diarrhea is because your intestinal lining is fucked. And then you're going to be dehydrated. You're not going to be able to absorb nutrients. Like it's gonna suck. [00:52:08] Speaker B: Yeah, pretty much. [00:52:10] Speaker C: And the blistering of the skin, it usually you can get ulcers, you can get necrosis. Mark was reading about necrosis for Sloeden. I think that's common. And then the last phase is called recovery or death, which is a great band name. True. And, and it is exactly as described. Like either you die from all of this stuff or you start to recover. And dying usually happens within anything from hours to up to maybe a month of exposure. And if you recover, it can take years. And even then you might have a lot of persistent effects. So like some things that people living after recovering from acute radiation syndrome might have would be copd, lung cancer, skin cancer, leukemia. The ataxia might never go away. You can specifically have difficulty with speech because you can't control the muscles that help you speak very well. You can have radiation induced brain tumors. You can have anemia, immune system impairments, loss of bone mass. Your bone marrow might never really make as many cells again. You might find yourself with infection, sepsis, or necrosis of your GI tract. You can get a perforated intestine. You can get a narrowing of your intestine. You can get a bowel obstruction. Like, all of these, like, things that are involved. Like, just because you lived doesn't mean your quality of life is great. [00:53:39] Speaker B: Right. You may regret it. [00:53:40] Speaker C: Yeah. So does that answer your question mark? [00:53:46] Speaker A: I mean, right. I don't know if either of you saw the kind of. The look on my face over the past 15 minutes, but that was the look of a guy who has had his question answered so beautifully and yes, has just. Right. This is the podcast I always wanted to make. [00:54:09] Speaker B: Right. [00:54:10] Speaker A: That's what this is. I'm so delighted with. Hopefully you answered that question and I. I really feel like I can put a full stop on that topic in my head now. [00:54:19] Speaker B: Can I ask one thing that. And again, we didn't ask you to research this, so I don't know what you know about this, but is there a difference? So, like, in the context of the bomb, right, A bomb gets dropped, things like that. We talked about, like, permeability in terms of your body and things getting in there. But, you know, obviously back in the day it was like all the, you know, duck under your desk or, you know, bomb shelters and things like that. Is there any protection from like, your house or things like that? Or are you getting the same amount whether you're standing outside or you are chilling in your finished basement? [00:55:00] Speaker C: Hmm. Okay. So I can sort of answer your question. [00:55:04] Speaker B: Okay. [00:55:05] Speaker C: Based on what I know about radiation. So I think part of my problem with answering it fully is that I have never worked with gamma radiation. And so I'm not exactly sure if this applies. But I do know that, like, for certain types of radiation that you work with in like a lab setting, there's different types of shielding and it does block to some degree it from getting to you. I'm not sure if that works with gamma because it is permeated. You know what I mean? Like, a lot of the shielding is used for, like, alpha emitters. I don't. I'm not 100% sure if there is something that would block it because, I mean, everything that I was talking about, it was going through metal. And so I'm just trying to think of. [00:55:43] Speaker B: That's a good point. Yeah. [00:55:44] Speaker C: Of what? [00:55:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Is there anything that is, you know, going to actually stop you if you were underground, would that help you in any way? You know, like all those bunkers that people were trying to make back in the day? That's just. That's a question to the void. If, you know, you can't answer that. [00:56:02] Speaker C: The thing about that. So with this like the, the, okay, the gamma rays happen and then they're done. So as soon as the nuclear reaction stops, that also stops, what's left is the other types of radiation. I think so. I feel like the bunker thing could work if like what you're trying to not get is all the, is the initial remaining alpha radiation, the initial blast protect from. [00:56:25] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [00:56:26] Speaker C: But the stuff that's left after, maybe you could. Is what I would say as someone who's never thought about it before. [00:56:33] Speaker B: Sure. [00:56:33] Speaker C: Yes. [00:56:33] Speaker B: This is the, this is conjecture. This is an educated guess based on your experience. But it's not necessarily, we don't. [00:56:39] Speaker C: Okay, it could just be. Pile of bullshit. [00:56:42] Speaker B: Yes, we are putting that out there, everyone. This is not the actual science. This is a guess. [00:56:48] Speaker C: Yeah, full guess. [00:56:50] Speaker B: Okay, interesting. [00:56:52] Speaker C: Good. Very, very modestly educated guess. [00:56:56] Speaker B: Mark, did you have it? Did you want to read your passage? Did you want to, you know, listen? [00:57:00] Speaker A: No, I, I, I, I'm delighted that Eileen's case was exactly the one that I was going to be reading about anyway. Just incredible. This, this, this case of Louis slowed in I, I, it, it really, really landed home. What they, what they found inside this guy when they did a post mortem on him, that it was just a mass, just a congealed mass. I was, I was gonna talk on that, but, but you know, you've, you've, you've done, you've done the job for me. Thank you so much. Thank you so, so, so, so much. [00:57:35] Speaker B: In the words of Otho from Beetlejuice, you read my mind. [00:57:39] Speaker A: You read my mind. [00:57:42] Speaker C: Oh, man, you guys make me so stressed. You're always like, wow, Eileen, you're so great. And I'm like, no, no, no, just be like, Eileen, you did okay. That would make me feel better about it. [00:57:55] Speaker B: Adequate, Eileen, adequate. [00:57:58] Speaker A: Job done. [00:57:59] Speaker C: See, that's not stressful. I don't have to live up to adequate. I think I can handle adequate on most days. [00:58:06] Speaker B: Beautiful. [00:58:09] Speaker A: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:58:11] Speaker B: Yes, please do. [00:58:12] Speaker A: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:58:16] Speaker B: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [00:58:20] Speaker A: The way I whispered the word sex cannibal recently. [00:58:22] Speaker C: Worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing. [00:58:24] Speaker B: To guillotine you for science. [00:58:26] Speaker A: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm fucking, I'm gonna leg it. [00:58:33] Speaker B: You know how I feel about that. [00:58:34] Speaker A: Mark, I think you feel great about it. [00:58:40] Speaker B: All right, you want to take us in? Marco? [00:58:43] Speaker A: Where. Where do we go next? [00:58:45] Speaker B: Well, I mean, you wanna. I guess you already kind of welcomed us or whatever, but we have whole other well thing that Eileen's gonna discuss after this. [00:58:53] Speaker A: So if you've joined us at this point halfway, why that'd be a weird thing to do. What a strange, fucking strange thing. Why do you consume podcasts like this? [00:59:04] Speaker B: Why did you start it halfway in? [00:59:08] Speaker A: But while we are blessed with Eileen's presence on the podcast this week, Corrigan also has the topic in her mind of the pseudoscience. [00:59:20] Speaker B: Well, I don't know yet. I'm gonna find out if it's a pseudoscience. [00:59:23] Speaker A: Is it? Is it? Corrigan is wondering if there is scotching to be done on the topic of. I think I'm right in saying central nervous system regulation. [00:59:37] Speaker B: Right? Yes. I described this two weeks ago a little bit and you know, I sent Eileen a message about this that it's a thing I've been seeing a lot of coming up from like those very kind of health and woo sort of accounts, you know, chiropractors, sorry Laura, but you know, like the like people who. [01:00:00] Speaker A: Kind of both Laura's. In fact my Laura as well, both. [01:00:02] Speaker B: Lauras, both Laura Latour and Laura Lewis, both the double L's interesting anyway, but this has kind of come up from a lot of like sources that I've seen where these are. People tend to buy into a lot of other stuff that's like, you know, supplements and things that you shill and like ideas about, you know, how changing your thought processes can fix things and like very kind of Maha adjacent ideas. If you're not American and not familiar, Make America Healthy Again RFK Jr. Sort of initiatives. Eat, eat raw meat type shit. Like it goes along with that kind of like pipeline right where people have started. And also a lot I've seen it coming from kind of the same sort of people who like, do like astrology and things of that nature. And I think this is where a lot of my skepticism comes from. But this idea that you can kind of attribute a good chunk of our problems to having a dysregulated nervous system. And so, you know, the nervous system is very important in how we operate. [01:01:15] Speaker C: Which obviously is true. [01:01:16] Speaker B: But the idea that we can do things to then regulate it that will reduce issues. Like for example, I sent Eileen this one that claimed that like, you know, a dysregulated nervous system is the reason you have pcos and the reason that you have, you know, various, like, pots and things like that, like all these sort of things that, you know, I think normally we consider something you're born with, but they're saying, oh, if your nervous system is regulated, you won't suffer from this. And so obviously that lights up a lot of sort of bullshit meters for me. But in trying, like sort of a cursory search of this, I realized that I just wasn't equipped with the knowledge to understand what I was reading in and of itself. [01:02:07] Speaker A: It smells whiffy. But you're not certain, right? [01:02:09] Speaker B: Like I couldn't totally tell from the things I was reading, like, what it was really saying about it. So I tasked Eileen with telling me what, what the shit is up with our nervous system and should I be paying more attention to mine and is dysregulating it, like why my joints don't work and things like that, something I. [01:02:27] Speaker A: Often see in my ever diminishing time on TikTok, which I, I feel falls under this topic because I know it's. But I, I don't know the science as to why accounts that promote kind of neurodiversity awareness and whatever will say, are you suffering from a busy mind? Are you suffering from lack of sleep? Are you suffering from, you know, difficulty focusing? Listen to this sound right, for 20 seconds and you'll find it and it's just right. Yeah, listen to this sound for 20 seconds and, and feel the calm. Just, just, just. Your thoughts will just start to fall. I'm like, fuck off. Will you just sit back. So clearly fucking cynical. Horrible. I'm, I'm not as familiar with this concept of a dysregulated nervous system as you. I don't think that has made its way into the vernacular, into the pseudoscience vernacular over here as it has over there. But the idea that it, that, that very real, you know, diagnosable, treatable conditions, like you've said, like pots, like pcos, that the same types of personality, the same types of grifters would blame that on nervous system dysregulation. [01:03:48] Speaker C: Right? [01:03:49] Speaker A: I mean. [01:03:52] Speaker B: So I wanted to know, like, because I think that is kind of. I tend to look at the type of person that spreads it and make assumptions. Right? But that's not science. So, you know, I could be very wrong about this. Which is why, Eileen, I've tasked you with helping me out here. What do I need to know about my nervous system? [01:04:11] Speaker C: Okay, so at the top, before I even go into this, I just want to say that I think That a lot of the pages that you're seeing are misinterpreting some research that is there. [01:04:22] Speaker B: So that's kind of why I was, when I was trying to research it, I was like, I think there's something to this, but I don't think it's what they are saying is to do this right. [01:04:32] Speaker C: Okay. A lot of times people who focus on, I hate to say the term wellness because wellness shouldn't be equated with. [01:04:40] Speaker B: Right. [01:04:40] Speaker C: With. [01:04:41] Speaker B: But it's sort of wellness with a. [01:04:42] Speaker A: Capital W. Great point. It's a great point. [01:04:44] Speaker B: Let's say it that way, you know? [01:04:46] Speaker C: Right. They tend to like, sometimes they place causality where there's just an association or a correlation, or sometimes they take something that's very complex and turn it into something very straightforward, which is just simply not the case. And so I think that what you're seeing is, is people misinterpreting something that is there. So I've split this into three parts. The first part is we're going to talk about what does it even mean to have a dysregulated nervous system. [01:05:13] Speaker B: Beautiful. [01:05:14] Speaker C: The second part is, are there any associations with a dysregulated nervous system and poorer health outcomes? And the third is, is there even anything you can do to dysregulate your nervous system? [01:05:24] Speaker B: Love it. That's. That's all the pieces that I want here. [01:05:28] Speaker A: So for in the interest of absolute ground up kind of knowledge, back to basics on this. Right. When we talk about the nervous system, specifically, what structures are we talking about here? [01:05:42] Speaker B: The brain. The brain. The center of the chain. Beta Search club. Sorry. [01:05:49] Speaker A: What the fuck? [01:05:50] Speaker C: Go ahead. This is perfect because this brings me to my first point. So I think a lot of people that you're looking at are talking about the central nervous system, but the evidence for nervous system dysregulation. Not that you can't have some sort of dysregulated central nervous system. Certainly you do in like neurodegenerative conditions and stuff. But what I think that the research that I think they're misinterpreting is actually the research on the autonomic nervous system. So that's all I'm going to talk about today. Do you know what the autonomic nervous system is? [01:06:19] Speaker B: I remember learning this in, you know, biology class in high school, but no recollection. [01:06:25] Speaker C: Okay. I guarantee you do. Once I talk about this just for a little bit more, you're going to recognize it. So your autonomic nervous system is the part of your Nervous system that controls the things you don't really think about. So we're talking breathing, we're talking digestion, we're talking your heart rate, your blood pressure, these types of things. [01:06:42] Speaker B: Yes. [01:06:43] Speaker C: And it has three branches, and one of them is to do with digestion. It's called the enteric nervous system. We're going to pretend it doesn't exist today for just, like, simplicity's sake. And we're only going to talk about sympathetic and parasympathetic. [01:06:58] Speaker B: Ah, yes, I remember these. [01:07:00] Speaker C: Yes. Okay. You know what they are? [01:07:02] Speaker B: No, no, no, no, no. I just remember learning this. Yeah, yeah. [01:07:05] Speaker C: I'm like, feel free. [01:07:06] Speaker B: No, you're just bringing back my like. Because I loved science when I was in high school. I just didn't know math well enough to continue doing science after I left the songs. Listen, watched a lot of Baby Searchers club, but, you know, so, like, the terms. I'm like, ah, yes, yes, I remember, you know, coloring in pictures and things like this that, like, described where these things were and whatnot. But go on. [01:07:31] Speaker C: Yes. [01:07:31] Speaker A: Tell me again, that term you just use, Eileen, was it the autonomous nervous system? Is that what you just said? [01:07:35] Speaker C: Autonomic. [01:07:36] Speaker A: Autonomic. [01:07:37] Speaker B: Okay, yes, autonomic. So it has sympathetic and parasympathetic. [01:07:40] Speaker C: Yes. And I have tried throughout this to not stick with, like, the scientific term and to make it easier. So if at any point you're like, what is she talking about? Please ask me. And if I can't tell you, I should not be here talking about this. [01:07:57] Speaker B: Fair enough. [01:07:59] Speaker C: All right. So sympathetic is fight or flight is the easiest way to think of it. It's going to be like a regulation state where you are more alert and active. It uses a lot of energy, so it's more metabolically expensive. And so the type of things that happen when you have a sympathetic or fight or flight response is your heart beats faster and that helps oxygen and nutrients get into your tissues. Your pupils dilate. The dilate the better to see whatever you're threatened with. Your airways and your lungs expand to let more oxygen in. Your adrenal glands are going to dump adrenaline into your bloodstream. Adrenaline can increase your heart rate. It can stimulate your liver to release sugar so that you have energy to go to your cells. You're going to have cortisol, that's the stress hormone everyone thinks about, which increases blood pressure and heart rate and suppresses digestion, and that's going through your bloodstream. And so there's different axes, and we're not even going to talk about them. But basically the whole point is to get resources mobilized so that you have resources to use to deal with whatever it is that whatever challenge or stressor or threat you're dealing with. Parasympathetic is rest and digest and recover. And in many ways, not always, but for today, and we're just saying it's mostly opposing. So, okay, you're thinking your heart rate's slower, your blood pressure is a little lower, your pupils get smaller, your digestion is very active. So you can think about it as a sympathetic system being like a, a short term survival mechanism and the parasympathetic system being like a long term investment. [01:09:45] Speaker B: Okay. [01:09:46] Speaker C: Okay, great. So at any time you want to be able to move flexibly between those two systems. [01:09:53] Speaker B: Sure. [01:09:54] Speaker C: It's not really that you shouldn't have an active sympathetic nervous system or that like you never want it active because it's helpful to you in certain situations. Right. But you want to be able to move back and forth between the two very easily. So another way that people think about this is a concept called the window of tolerance. And this was a concept introduced by Dr. Dan Siegel in the 1990s. It's nothing new. And it's the idea that your window of tolerance is your functional range. That's the range of nervous system activation where you can handle stressful challenges. Okay. [01:10:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:10:30] Speaker C: If you shift above, you're in hyper arousal and if you shift below, you're in hypoarousal. [01:10:37] Speaker B: Right. [01:10:37] Speaker C: And most of the time when I see someone talk about the window of tolerance, they're usually using it to, to help people with mental health, health issues because of like something like PTSD or someone who's experienced a lot of trauma or autistics. Because yes, all of those people have a narrower window of tolerance. [01:10:59] Speaker B: Right. [01:11:00] Speaker A: This is so. [01:11:02] Speaker B: See, Mark's like light bulb going off right now. [01:11:05] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:11:06] Speaker A: I. Over the past kind of six months, I have learned to get used to the fact that I am going to react so badly in certain very, very trivial circumstances. When work comes my way that I'm not expecting or when I get like, you know, when I'm called upon to act in particular ways of work, I immediately, immediately my body reacts so badly. [01:11:34] Speaker B: With fight or flight. [01:11:36] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly, exactly. I will, I will. I am very quick to emotion, very quick to anger, very quick to almost preserve myself somehow. But then I know, step back, think about it rationally, everything will be cool. But in the fucking moment, everything goes haywire. Everything just goes absolutely fucking haywire. Um, and you're described. You're describing exactly that. [01:12:02] Speaker C: And you basically just took the words out of my mouth to describe what hyperarousal feels like. You've got anxiety, you've got fear, you've got panic. You might be more irritable. You might have like an emotional outburst. You might feel really like muscles tense, difficulty concentrating, racing thoughts. And you may even know that like, this probably isn't reasonable to the situation. [01:12:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:12:22] Speaker C: And yeah, that's kind of. That's. That's it. It's like, is your nervous system able to respond reasonably to the stress that you're dealing with? And if not, then you could consider it dysregulation from this framework. So I think a lot of people with trauma, people with ptsd, people who are autistic, really see themselves in it, which is why I'm talking about it. Hypoarousal is the exact opposite. So hyper arousal. You could almost say I'm stuck in fight or flight or I'm like too activated. I'm over activated. I had a sympathetic response, but it went too far. With hypoarousal, it's a shutdown, so you don't really get a sympathetic response, but it is not a parasympathetic response. A parasympathetic response is restful because you feel safe. If you're in hypoarousal, you are also trying to protect yourself. So it's like, it's nothing to do with a personality trait. It's like a survival mechanism and. [01:13:16] Speaker B: Right. So it's like a shutting down instead of a, like ramping up. [01:13:20] Speaker C: Yeah. This is so overwhelming that I just feel disconnected and numb. I might not feel very many emotions at all. I might feel like I'm sort of withdrawn from the events and the people around me. [01:13:33] Speaker B: Right. [01:13:33] Speaker C: That's kind of what it feels to be in hypo arousal now. Your window. [01:13:39] Speaker B: I think I experienced that one a lot more than the other one. I'm like. I mean, I do get the like anxiety things, but I think if like something gets really overwhelming and stuff like that, I kind of go into like, like, yeah, just low power mode of like I am on the outside of whatever the hell is going on here and just like remove me. [01:13:59] Speaker A: You've described that yourself. That, that one time, was it your cousin that was drowning and you just basically. [01:14:03] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Yes. Like no adrenaline rush or anything. Just like, oh, I guess I'm dying now and holding her above the water. [01:14:10] Speaker C: Right. [01:14:11] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah. I tend to underreact. More than overreact to. [01:14:16] Speaker A: Whereas I don't think anyone has ever once, ever, ever said to me, mark, you don't seem to react much. You're not, Mark, underreacting there, Mark. Not something I hear often. [01:14:33] Speaker C: It's okay, Mark. [01:14:34] Speaker B: This is why we work. [01:14:35] Speaker C: I'm also a chronic overreactor, so. Solidarity. Yeah, I was reading it and I was like, oh, man. [01:14:44] Speaker B: Oh, there it is. [01:14:46] Speaker C: My husband will listen to this and he'll just giggle. Yeah. Anyway, okay, so your window of tolerance isn't fixed, but it's not like if you have a really small window of tolerance, it's going to be easy to get a really big one. So I think that. And I'll probably come up with lots of places where I'm like, I think that people are getting this wrong. I think that's part of it. I think, first of all, I think that a lot of people who are talking about nervous system regulation actually even realize it's the autonomic nervous system that the research is on. They think it's the central nervous system, and that's a different thing. I think another thing is they think if you do whatever it is that you're going to have just magical effects. And while, like, maybe you can impact it some, it's not like there's anything out there that's going to make you a totally different person. [01:15:35] Speaker B: So I just want, like Mark was saying, like, he can try to talk himself off the ledge or whatever, but it's. It's an automatic. [01:15:42] Speaker A: Recognize it. It doesn't change it happening. But I've learned to recogn it happening so I can try and rationalize. Mark, this isn't really. You don't have to react like this, dude. And if you give yourself an hour, it'll be fine. But it still happens in the moment. You know, I've just become aware of it now. [01:15:58] Speaker C: Yeah, that makes sense. And your perception really does matter. Like, whether you view it as a reasonable response can matter. Whether you view the thing that's happening as stressful definitely matters. Like, you know, the same things might not stress the three of us out. [01:16:15] Speaker B: Right. [01:16:15] Speaker C: Like, we might have a very different response to the same thing. Maybe going in a cave, I might be like, oh, no, I hate everything about this, and I want out right now. And I'm imagining that my reaction would be bigger than either of yours. [01:16:33] Speaker B: Famously, as I have discussed before, that apparently I disassociate in claustrophobic situations. [01:16:41] Speaker C: Yeah, it's. [01:16:42] Speaker B: It's again, I think an under. Yeah, just detach from it situation. [01:16:51] Speaker A: One of my Most frequent triggers is just tiny setbacks. Just the tiniest. Just this very little setback to my plan. Small things. [01:17:06] Speaker B: Yep. [01:17:07] Speaker C: Relatable. [01:17:10] Speaker B: Okay, so that all makes sense. [01:17:11] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:17:12] Speaker B: So you've got like, it's a. It can move. It's not, you know, you don't have necessarily always the exact same window of tolerance, but it's also not necessarily about. Or it's. It's a thing that we don't necessarily have like direct control over so much as the. The stimulus or whatever is kind of the. The issue. [01:17:30] Speaker C: You. Well, we'll get to it. Okay. [01:17:33] Speaker B: Yeah, Right. [01:17:34] Speaker C: Okay. [01:17:34] Speaker B: We'll get to how much control we have over it. Yeah, we'll get to. [01:17:37] Speaker C: We have over it. Not total control is okay. Like definitely not. So anything that's like telling you that they're going to fix your nervous system dysregulation, I feel like is like. Okay, but. Yeah. But anything like the frequency of stressful events, your physical health status, how much sleep you've been getting, your present emotional state, like supportive relationships that you do or don't have and supports available to you, which could be anything. Like, it could be a safe place to sleep. It could be enough money to buy enough groceries like there. It could be, you know, therapy, it could be whatever. [01:18:11] Speaker B: Right. [01:18:11] Speaker C: Like, lots of things can affect your windows. Window of tolerance. And also of course there's always some genetic component. There's always some nature, nurture stuff going on, your personal health habits, all that stuff. [01:18:23] Speaker B: So in that sense, that is one element of like kind of what these wellness people are talking about is often sort of limiting those triggers, if you will, those things that, you know, are you with like safe people in. In safe environments and things like that. Like that def. That does make an impact on like. [01:18:43] Speaker A: You said earlier, window. The. It's such a shame that the word wellness has these connotations because as a concept being. What's wrong with being well? [01:18:54] Speaker B: Yeah, being well is great. [01:18:56] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. [01:18:56] Speaker A: But it's capital W. Wellness is the issue. [01:18:59] Speaker B: Wellness industry, if you will. But. So that is the thing that they are getting right, is that those situational things do have an impact on your window of tolerance in terms of that idea of regulating your nervous system. [01:19:14] Speaker C: Okay, great. Also, it. Being an industry tells you everything to know about why it's a problem. [01:19:20] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, exactly. [01:19:23] Speaker C: Okay, so I'm going to put another couple concepts out there and then I'm going to start talking about the health piece. So there's another guy named Bruce McEwen. He is a neuro. Well was a neuroscientist and he studied stress and he came up with these terms. Allostasis, allostatic load, and allostatic overload. Allostasis just means your ability to adapt to stress. It's kind of like stress homeostasis. [01:19:45] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, that makes sense. [01:19:47] Speaker C: Allostatic load is the, like the physiological cost you can have if you are exposed to too much stress. And allostatic overload is when that dysregulates your nervous system, basically in the simplest terms. So I'm giving you these terms because some stuff later refers to it. And it's kind of just another way to understand autonomic nervous system dysregulation. Okay, so we've kind of already talked about how there's multiple ways it can be dysregulated. You could have it be frequently activated or over activated. You can have a failed shutdown where your sympathetic nervous system or your fight or flight just doesn't really shut off. And you can have. Where it doesn't activate it, which is like the more the hypo arousal sort of. It's probably would be beneficial in some situations to have a sympathetic response, but you're not getting one. Those are all examples of having a dysregulated nervous system in the moment. And that can be. It can become a prevailing state. Like you can get people who have like their nervous system function shifts either higher or lower, and that's when it can lead to health issues. Spoiler alert. So, yeah, there's. Okay, so there's a lot of things to talk about here. There's something called the guts theory that I found, and this is relatively new. It's from the lab from someone named Julian Thayer. It's a generalized unsafety theory of stress. So I keep talking about stress. I'm going to say chronic stress so many times today, you're never going to want to hear it again. But he poses that fight or flight is actually the default activation state. He says sympathetic is where you'll always be unless you feel safe. [01:21:22] Speaker B: Okay, interesting. [01:21:24] Speaker C: Which is an interesting way of looking at it. And there's maybe from an evolutionary perspective, some sense to that, and there's even some articles out there showing lower expression of an adrenergic receptor. Adrenergic just means the receptor binds with adrenaline. Lower expression of this one receptor is. It leads to increased sympathetic nervous system activity. And specifically humans and chimpanzees have lower expression of this receptor. Okay. They're also known for fighting more, right? Yes, like, than other non human primates. And so the idea is that maybe from an evolutionary standpoint, like it turned up the volume, the paper said turbocharged your sympathetic nervous system. And maybe that was beneficial and now is not so much so. So this guts theory can also maybe explain certain states that some people would say are not stressors. Like loneliness is associated with a dysregulated nervous system. Because if you're lonely and you don't have anyone to rely on, maybe you don't feel safe. Is kind of like his idea. [01:22:26] Speaker B: Sure. [01:22:28] Speaker C: Also they see that, I think in elderly people who have less social support and social isolation in general. So from an evolutionary perspective, we might be more predisposed towards fight or flight. Yet we can see that over activation or failed shutdown or failed activation can cause maybe some issues for us that could lead to a chronic autonomic imbalance and then we can get allostatic overload and then we can start to see health effects on our health. And at the end of the day it's, it's possible that this is because we have an inability to feel safe or maybe an inability to tolerate uncertainty would be a better way to put it. [01:23:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:23:07] Speaker C: So let's switch gears. Let's start talking about health. This is so complicated. So I can understand why someone would look at this who has not had any like real like, you know, graduate level science background and be like, what the fuck? [01:23:22] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:23:24] Speaker C: So part of it is that a lot of this research is going to be on chronic stress causing the autonomic nervous system dysregulation and stress. Research has, there's a lot of difficulties specific to this type of research. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but just like a couple things. So there's dissent about what counts as stress. I already mentioned like some people say loneliness is a type of stress. Some people would say it isn't. There is at least one group out there who says it's not stress, it's safety. You know, like people can't really like seem to agree. On the human and clinical side, it's all self report. On the preclinical side, there's arguments about like, what counts as stress, how do you know that rat is stressed? You know, and that's actually very valid. There's lots of types of stress people use for rodents. And they're like, maybe that doesn't even relate to anything that would happen to a human. Or the way that you measured stress was an array of behavioral tests. And I don't believe that that test tells me that that rat is anxious, you know. [01:24:19] Speaker B: Sure. [01:24:20] Speaker C: And there's. There's some validity there. [01:24:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. It's a. It's a subjective thing. It's almost emotional, or at least the way that we experience it often feels emotional. Whereas obviously, there are reactions, there's chemicals, there's things going on, but it is. Yeah. There's a subjective element to what stress is. [01:24:43] Speaker C: Yeah. And even then, like, it seems like, you know, people often use biomarkers or specific physiological responses, it's like, to talk about stress, but they don't agree on what you should be measuring necessarily. So there's not like, a set of biomarker panel even in, like, clinical, like, settings for humans who have, you know, post traumatic stress or like, something like that. So since there's no real consensus seemingly, on how to study it, and it's something that's just inherently difficult to study, I think that sometimes it leads to people making some claims that maybe aren't what their research actually showed. [01:25:22] Speaker B: Right, okay. [01:25:23] Speaker C: So just out of the top, get that out of the way. [01:25:26] Speaker B: Right. [01:25:26] Speaker C: But despite all these challenges, there's actually overwhelming evidence that chronic stress and autonomic nervous system dysregulation leads to poorer health outcomes. This is kind of across the board. And we used to think it was pretty simple. We used to think, okay, well, you get too much stress, that means you get too much cortisol. You get, okay, something called reduced heart rate variability. So heart rate variability just means the amount of time between each heartbeat. Right. And higher heart rate variability is actually associated with higher vagus nerve activation. And your vagus nerve is one of your cranial nerves. And it's the only one that innervates a whole bunch of stuff below your neck. So it's going to your heart, it's going to your lungs, it's going to your digestive tract, and it's a huge part of your autonomic nervous system. So when people measure heart rate variability, they're using it to measure vagal tone. And higher heart rate variability means high vagal activity, and low heart rate variability means low vagal activity, and you want more vagal activity to be more flexible with your nervous system. You following Mark? [01:26:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:26:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:26:37] Speaker C: Okay. Okay. So we used to think, okay, we get stressed, have a bunch of cortisol, have reduced heart rate variability. We get high blood pressure, and it impairs our immune system. And this is simple, but the difficult thing is that everything interacts. So it's not that simple. So I'm gonna try and cover A little bit without getting too crazy about it. [01:27:05] Speaker B: In the weeds. [01:27:06] Speaker C: Yeah, in the weeds. Because it's difficult even for me. Right. To understand. That sounds so pretentious. Even for me. [01:27:14] Speaker B: Even for me. [01:27:17] Speaker C: I don't mean that. I'm sweet smart. You're the science person. [01:27:20] Speaker B: Yeah. That's why you're here. Christ. [01:27:25] Speaker C: I'm just gonna pretend I didn't say that and move on. All right? So. [01:27:31] Speaker A: You can ask her to cut it out. [01:27:32] Speaker B: Listen, I won't. I won't. No, you're on a podcast where we had to find first ask you what the nervous system was. So I think an even for me in this situation is perfectly reasonable. [01:27:43] Speaker C: You're very kind. All right. Okay. So all this cross talk is just a lot. So what I decided to do in the end is start talking about the immune system. Because the immune system is implicated in a lot of the other things that happen because of a dysregulated autonomic nervous system. And up until like a few decades ago, people probably would have said that the immune system and the nervous system didn't even interact at all. That is patently false. It interacts on many levels. Sure. So we know that like stress induced immune deficits have been implicated in all sorts of things. We're talking type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, autoimmune disorders, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, lots of stuff. So how could this happen? So your immune system is made up of a whole bunch of different cells, and they're usually spread throughout your body. And when you have an acute stressor, like let's say I set my dinner on fire tonight on the stovetop or something, and I got to deal with putting it out. Stress hormones are going to mobilize my immune cells to my bloodstream. And let's say I burned my hand. They can even mobilize it to the site where I was injured. Right. So that's a good thing. I mean, my skin barrier would be compromised on my hand if I. If I burned it. I want to not get an infection because of that. So that's what I want to happen. But with chronic stress, you get diminishes. It diminishes your immune cells capacity to respond. And here's the theory on how it does that. The idea is that while cortisol might be anti inflammatory in nature is. And inflammation and immunity kind of go hand in hand. If you have chronic stress and cortisol is circulating at high levels often, then your immune cells become desensitized. That makes sense. [01:29:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So they stop rushing to the site of the problem and they're like, yes. [01:29:46] Speaker C: And they stop being as quickly mobilized and you also would end up with higher levels of inflammation. I kind of hate talking about inflammation. My lab actually studies inflammation. I work in a stress physiology lab. I don't study this type of stress, but we still study inflammation. And like people are always talking about inflammation and. Yeah, that's another big wellness spaces. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm like, your body has inflammation at all times. Shut the fuck up. Anyway, it's a gradient. Like even your nervous system, like thinking about it in a binary. Doesn't work. That doesn't work for most things. It's like there's always some, but in this case you're going to get more than you want. Sure. So okay, I'll try to keep my soapboxes out of it, but it's hard, you know. [01:30:31] Speaker B: No, it's fine. [01:30:32] Speaker C: You're welcome to it. [01:30:34] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting because it's like stuff that like I observe in my travels through social media and things like that and seeing people talk about this stuff. But obviously, you know, I tend to be a little skeptical of it, but I don't have like a reason behind that so much as a just, I don't know, do I sign on to the next fad of this? And then, you know, it was inflammation six months ago and it's my nervous system now. You know, how do I make these decisions? So it's interesting to hear where those things come into play in your own research and the way that you respond to those as well. [01:31:08] Speaker C: And it's also interesting because I feel like they just pick a different piece of a complicated system. And like. [01:31:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that seems to be what I'm getting is like then you. Yeah, it's not that, it's not this, it's that, it's this and that and that and that. [01:31:21] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:31:21] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. [01:31:22] Speaker C: Anyway, okay, I'll stop yelling at the ether. Right. [01:31:28] Speaker B: So. [01:31:29] Speaker C: Okay. So it even gets more complicated than that. So chronic stress can be associated with both diseases that involve increased activity of your immune system. So autoimmune conditions or even inflammation related diseases. So that would be heart disease. So we don't actually know how inflammation is fully a part of heart disease. But like statins, for example, are anti inflammatory drugs and those are like commonly prescribed to people with heart disease. So that's why I'm saying inflammation related. So we know it's involved in those types of things which would be like, okay, the, the immune system has increased activity, but it's also associated with immune suppression. So what that means is after chronic stress, you often see maybe your response to a viral infection isn't very good, or you get a vaccine, but it doesn't work very well for you. Because how vaccines work is they recruit your immune system and if your immune system function is suppressed, then it doesn't work very well. And the idea is, okay, well how do both of these things happen at the same time? And so there's something called the conserved transcriptional response to adversity. And this is a genetic profile that researchers have found to be associated with various types of adversity. So social isolation, early life adversity, poverty, and chronic stress are all examples of things that this genetic profile can be associated with. And this genetic profile basically shifts your immune system from a state with protection from viral illness being like the priority to a state that's more pro inflammatory. So you no longer have the antiviral protection, but you are ramping up the inflammation. [01:33:02] Speaker B: Okay, yeah. [01:33:04] Speaker C: So that is like my. So my husband has a degree in genetics and immunology and I told him I was going to talk about the immune system and he basically told me to tell everyone the immune system is in this black box. Don't think about it. It's just doing stuff. You don't need to worry about it. [01:33:18] Speaker B: I do think about that a lot. Honestly. I'm like, there is a system running inside of me that's like doing all this and I don't. I have no clue how that works. [01:33:27] Speaker A: Let me re replay what I've understood there and tell me if I've got the right end of the stick here. [01:33:31] Speaker C: Okay. [01:33:33] Speaker A: If as an individual, I am, if, if. If my personal circumstances are stressors, I. E. I am not in a. I'm not well homed. I'm not well, my nutrition is off. I'm, you know, my relationships aren't solid. I'm either suffering from loneliness or violent relationships or my, you know, various kind of external life pressures can divert the parts of my immune system that would, if all of those elements were in check and I was in a place of safety and comfort and well being, would ordinarily be diverted towards fighting illness and other external kind of factors. [01:34:24] Speaker C: Mm. [01:34:25] Speaker A: Having a stressed out fucking life generally will divert resources bodily from fighting disease and regulating your own internal kind of systems. [01:34:37] Speaker C: Yeah, kind of. And so basically the thought I think here is that your immune system's still active, but the, the, the genes that are active are now pro inflammatory and also may be Geared towards more of like a long term bacterial infection versus a short viral infection. And so I think the idea is that your body is still trying to protect you. It's just trying to protect you in a way that doesn't really make sense. But your body doesn't know that. Right? Yeah, that's what I took from it. So basically how you described it is, is pretty accurate. And also like, I'm simplifying this a bit because like there, there's not really another way to talk about it, make it easily understand, understandable. Because like the thing is. Shut up. I knew it, I thought of it. I'm like, I just almost said something stupid again. Couldn't let it go anyway. But like, no, it's just like the idea of risk factors, I think it doesn't necessarily mean this is going to happen to you. It means you are at greater risk. You know what I mean? So it's not like this is 100% what's going to happen to you if you live a stressful life. It's like this can happen to you or can be a contributing factor. And that's like kind of the things you see in, in research that's, you know, reasonable, that's making reasonable claims. They're never going to be like, if you get stressed out, you're gonna get heart disease. Right. [01:36:09] Speaker B: You know? [01:36:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:36:10] Speaker C: They're gonna say if you don't manage your stress well, it can dysregulate your. [01:36:14] Speaker B: Nerves, associated with a higher risk of. [01:36:17] Speaker C: And it's associated with a higher risk of developing heart disease. Yeah, right, yeah. So anything that you see that's like this causes this. I'm always like, right. I mean, very few things are that straightforward. [01:36:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:36:33] Speaker C: Okay, so, okay, now I'm going to shift my shift to like some of the mental health stuff. And the immune system is still involved. And that's why I put the immune system at the top. So we know that several mental health disorders are accompanied with alterations in your autonomic nervous system activity. Things like depression, bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder are what came up the most for me. And the literature suggests that negative, and in this case negative means sadness, anxiety, fear, guilt, moods and emotions like that. Moods were determined, were called like a long term experience. And emotion is a more like short term transient experience. They are associated with reduced parasympathetic activity. So reduced rest and digest activity. And then there's also some evidence, and this is in people who do not have any mental health disorders and don't have any like overarching Medical issue. Like. Like heart disease. Just people. Those weird normies that apparently exist. [01:37:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Somewhere out there. [01:37:39] Speaker C: I don't know any of them, but apparently they found out. [01:37:41] Speaker A: You sure as fuck don't listen to this. I'll tell. [01:37:43] Speaker C: Yeah, right. Yeah. There's also evidence in those same people that like positive affect. So things like joy and excitement and contentment is associated with more parasympathetic activity. And overall the negative affect is studied more and there's more evidence for it. But I'm not actually sure if that's because negative affect has a bigger impact or if. Because people don't really study things that they don't think are a problem. [01:38:09] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Oh, no. You're too happy and rested. [01:38:13] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:38:14] Speaker B: Better spend a couple million on that. [01:38:16] Speaker C: Right, Exactly. [01:38:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:38:18] Speaker C: And so the theory here is that negative affect can lead to decreased rest and digest activity, which can lead to increased inflammation. And that's because parasympathetic vagal nerve activity regulates the inflammatory response by decreasing the production of pro inflammatory cytokines. I'll. Hang on, hang on. Okay, so a pro. I trust you. A pro inflammatory cytokine is just a small protein that your immune cells can release and causes inflammation. So basically what they're saying is reduced parasympathetic response means you get more pro inflammatory proteins. Yeah. Right. So. And they've said that this can contribute to the development of mental health disorders like depression. A lot of what I saw for this was about depression. Now, I want to be very, very clear. Not all patients with depression have increased inflammation. [01:39:19] Speaker B: Right. [01:39:21] Speaker C: But there is a decent body of evidence, including some longitudinal studies that support that inflammation can contribute to the development of depression. And one of the studies that I saw it, they said it played a role in roughly 30% of cases in their study. Okay, that's just one study. I don't know if that's true of like the whole population, but what I'm trying to make sure that people understand is I'm not saying that inflammation causes depression. [01:39:43] Speaker B: Right. That's way oversimplifying what is being said in these. [01:39:48] Speaker C: What's being said is you can have it be a contributing factor, and it can be because your autonomic nervous system is a little bit out of whack. Right, sure. So. All right. One of the things that they study too, is reduced heart rate variability. So I talked about that heart rate variability, the amount of time between each beat of your heart. Right. And they've linked that people with depression have reduced heart rate variability compared to people who don't and so some people out there are saying maybe this should be a biomarker, but we don't actually have any data that says that it precedes depression. You know, and it's kind of hard to do a study because, like, how do you tell a rat is depressed and. [01:40:32] Speaker B: Right. [01:40:32] Speaker C: What. What are you going to do? Like, I think someone would. Realistically, they probably have to just follow a large population of people over time and see when depression, like, yeah, when it strikes. [01:40:45] Speaker B: Strikes. [01:40:46] Speaker C: And, like, it's not really a very feasible study to do. [01:40:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:40:49] Speaker C: So I think it's kind of hard to say, like, oh, heart rate variability is a good biomarker for this, but there are some people out there who think it should be. So. Okay, take that. So there's a lot of other things, and I just decided we don't want to go deeply in detail about how your autonomic nervous system dysregulation could cause all of these. So I'm just going to basically start listing some things. [01:41:13] Speaker B: Okay. [01:41:13] Speaker C: And then tell you a few things that could cause autonomic nervous system dysregulation that aren't chronic stress. Because I just keep talking about chronic stress all the time right now. And that's also a simplified thing. So there are cardiovascular stuff. You can get hypertension, which makes sense because when you have a lot of sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system responses, you are, like, elevating your blood pressure and you're increasing your heart rate. And so it makes sense that you could get hypertension. You also can get high cholesterol with, like, concurrent low levels of the quote, unquote, good cholesterol. You can get, over time, hardening of your arteries, which can lead to coronary heart disease. So that is, like the main cause of heart attacks. So you can get poor, you know, cardiovascular outcomes with this contributing, but likely not the only thing at play. [01:42:06] Speaker B: Right. [01:42:06] Speaker C: And we also know that inflammation is involved in heart disease somehow, so your immune system probably is related to it, but I can't tell you how and neither can anyone else right now with any certainty that I'm aware of. You can also have things like insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes and dysregulated lipid metabolism. And that also makes sense based on what I told you right back at the beginning. Like, when you have a sympathetic response, your liver is kicking out sugars into your system. If you're kicking out sugar into your system all the time, then maybe insulin is going to stop working. Insulin's just supposed to take. Take the sugar And. And put it into your cells, basically, so you can use it. [01:42:43] Speaker B: Right. [01:42:44] Speaker C: If you're just constantly getting this and not really needing it, you can develop these metabolic conditions. And lipid metabolism makes sense too, because what lipids do. And. Well, one of the things that they do is they're involved in hormone production. And if you constantly have your or your sympathetic nervous system active, you're kicking out stress hormones all the time. Right. So I can see how that would be involved. You can also get things like headaches, migraines. Your pain perception system interacts with your autonomic nervous system. So a lot of people with chronic pain have dysfunction in their autonomic nervous system. It's been associated with things like fibromyalgia, sleep disturbances. And that can be involved because those pro inflammatory cytokines, those inflammatory proteins, actually affect sleep. So that makes sense. They can also affect things like learning and memory. There's some research out there that suggests that the. The immune system is involved in the course of Alzheimer's disease now. And so now scientists are looking into targeting the immune system as a way to treat some neurodegenerative diseases. [01:43:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I've seen stuff about that. [01:43:56] Speaker C: Yeah, you can get neurons atrophying, and that can cause, like, cognitive decline. And then some people say that. And you can decide what you think about this, that if you have cognitive decline, it can also make it so that you aren't able to respond as well to future threats because your cognition is compromised. [01:44:15] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. [01:44:16] Speaker C: Well, there's. All this stuff can happen. Also digestive issues, which I've largely avoided because I was pretty sure I was gonna have to talk about the enteric nervous system too, if I did, and I didn't wanna. [01:44:25] Speaker B: Fair enough. Yep, that's fine. [01:44:28] Speaker C: I was like, this is already too long. It's like, we will be under three hours today, so help me. And I don't know that I'm doing great. [01:44:36] Speaker B: You're doing all right. [01:44:37] Speaker C: You're doing all right. [01:44:39] Speaker B: I'm trying. [01:44:41] Speaker C: So there is, like, just this overwhelming amount of research out there that shows that this can contribute to this problem. So that's kind of bleak. What else could affect your autonomic nervous system? So many things. So substance abuse, poor sleep. If you're diabetic and you don't manage your blood sugar, that can cause nerve damage in your autonomic nervous system. There are some autoimmune system. [01:45:06] Speaker A: I will. I will share. [01:45:09] Speaker C: Go ahead. [01:45:12] Speaker A: You talk about substance abuse affecting the autonomic nervous system. A very scary moment happened to Me. A year or so. Well, more than a year or so. [01:45:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Way past a year ago now. [01:45:23] Speaker A: Closer to two years, maybe a bit more, in that I'd been. I'd been quite heavily using ketamine and taking dihydrocodine at the same time, and I realized I wasn't automatically breathing. I thought, wait a minute, I don't seem to breathe for a while. And I had to actually, like, put thought in. Like, I had to breathe purposefully as opposed to just let it happen. [01:45:52] Speaker B: That's a horrifying thought. [01:45:54] Speaker A: That was wild. [01:45:56] Speaker C: Jesus, that would be terrifying. [01:45:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Interesting. So, yeah, just what you're saying, substances contributing to this stuff. [01:46:07] Speaker C: Yeah. Can. Wow. Mark's giving me a sympathetic nervous system response just telling me about his past experiences. My. My window of tolerance is very narrow. [01:46:22] Speaker A: I'm all better now. More better now. [01:46:24] Speaker B: Yes. [01:46:25] Speaker C: That's good. Okay. Thank you for interrupting me and letting me get a drink of water. Okay. Autoimmune disorders. I don't even know how to pronounce this. It's like Guillain Beret syndrome. [01:46:37] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. It's pronounced in a way that it's not supposed to be, because I think if you pronounced it like it was French, it's like Guillain Barre or something, but it's actually like Gillen Barrett or something. [01:46:47] Speaker C: Ye. Yeah. [01:46:48] Speaker B: Not what you think it's not. [01:46:49] Speaker C: And it looks like, like, Gillian Bar or something like that to me. I don't know. [01:46:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like berry or something, like, just not what you expect it to be pronounced. Like. [01:46:58] Speaker C: Whatever it is. I can't pronounce it. And it's fine. It's fine. It can. It. What it does is it, like, directly impacts your autonomic nervous system. It's like your immune system attacking. Attacking your autonomic nervous system. You can also get head or spinal cord injuries that can be a problem. And then depending on whether or not you classify them as stress or not, you could say that trauma or early life adversity is a separate thing. Right. That can also impact this, which is. [01:47:26] Speaker B: One of the things that comes up a lot with these things that I see on, like, Instagram and stuff like that, you know, is the idea of, like, it's your. Your childhood trauma and things like that that is, like, fucking up your. Your system. [01:47:41] Speaker C: I still feel like that. That's crazy to me, because when people talk about early life adversity, like, they are. I mean, maybe there's more people than I realize who were, like, massively abused. [01:47:51] Speaker B: Right. [01:47:51] Speaker C: But, like, they're talking about rather severe. [01:47:54] Speaker B: Right. So not just like. I mean, there's scales of neglect and abuse, but the degree of this is like we're talking about, you know, child culinary levels of trauma, Turpin family trauma. [01:48:08] Speaker A: There's that. That book, isn't it? The Body Keeps the Score. Is it. Is it possible that physically I will hold the memory of trauma even if my mind, if I've forgotten it, if it happened before I was able to form memories, if I was. If I. If I'd been party to like a horrific event or abuse, but I have absolutely no memory of it, can my body physically still be reacting to that in some of the ways you describe? [01:48:44] Speaker C: So I would very hesitantly actually say yes. And I would say that because. So what you're thinking of is like a cellular type of memory and not what you think of with memory. But I say that's definitely possible. And I'm actually going to use the immune system as an example because apparently I just want to torture myself. So, like, just think about how, how your immune system responds when you come in contact with a virus. Like it makes antibodies and it remembers that virus. So we know that it's possible for your cells to contain information that you, as you know, your cognitive ability, you have no idea about. Like, you would have come across plenty of pathogens and not been aware because they didn't make you sick, or maybe they made you sick, but you didn't know what it was. So I would say that the mechanisms are in place that are possible for your cells to retain information. Have I dived into that literature? Right. No. Have I read that book? [01:49:50] Speaker B: No, but theoretically based on other scientific principles. [01:49:55] Speaker C: Principles, yeah. I wouldn't outlaw it, but at least not without looking into it more. But I do think that that type of research is kind of beyond the scope of what we're really capable of doing with science. [01:50:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:50:12] Speaker B: So it's all kind of a theoretical, you know, we don't know how to test that at this point. [01:50:17] Speaker C: Yeah. But I mean, I don't know. I think that if, like, okay, if someone undergoes a lot of trauma and then they reproduce, if we like, there's a whole field called epigenetics, and it's not actual genetics. It's like modifications to your genetics. That's another way that something I think could be passed. [01:50:39] Speaker B: Right. [01:50:39] Speaker C: I don't know. It's. [01:50:40] Speaker B: It's. [01:50:41] Speaker C: I'm gonna stop talking about it because it's way too complicated. [01:50:44] Speaker B: That's for another. We'll have you dive in, into that on another one. But back to our nervous system. [01:50:50] Speaker C: Yeah, back to our nervous system. Okay. Neurodegenerative disease can also cause progressive autonomic nervous system failure. In particular, there's a class of neurodegenerative diseases called alpha synucleinopathies. And you can forget that word immediately. All it means is that alpha synuclein accumulates in your brain cells. And the most like commonly known one would be Parkinson's disease. So Parkinson's disease, neurodegeneration, as that disease progresses can cause autonomic nervous system dysfunction. So I'm telling you all this just to say, like, I. I'm very averse to the idea that you are fully in control and also fully personally responsible for the regulation of your autonomic nervous system. I think that is not really a good way to look at it because there are so many things that can impact it. And also you're not fully in control of what happens to you ever. Like. [01:51:50] Speaker B: Right. [01:51:50] Speaker C: The chronic stress that you have, some of it, you know, can be self inflicted. I am sure living proof of this. But largely, a lot of the things that happen to me are beyond my control, including if you experience trauma, if you are neurodivergent, like just telling someone that they should, you know, take the personal responsibility for this bothers me in general. Just on principle. [01:52:16] Speaker B: Right. [01:52:17] Speaker A: Yes. [01:52:18] Speaker C: So I don't know. Take that and do with it what you want. All right, we're coming into the home stretch. We're gonna talk about what is the re. The evidence that you can regulate your autonomic. Your nervous system. Is there any. [01:52:35] Speaker B: Yeah, this is. I'm very curious. [01:52:38] Speaker C: Yeah. And contrary to what you might expect. [01:52:41] Speaker B: Okay. [01:52:42] Speaker C: There's actually a fair amount of research that some of these things can at least activate your parasympathetic nervous system or can increase your heart rate variability. Okay. So I don't know what the pages you've been looking at have been telling you to do, but there's a number of things out there that have been shown to do this also in some cases improve sleep, in some cases maybe just help you regulate your emotions. And maybe there's not necessarily a physiological component to that. So you just decide what you think about it. I'm going to tell you what I found. [01:53:17] Speaker B: Okay. [01:53:17] Speaker C: All right. I already said that. Let's just. I put information from one of my soapboxes in here. Clearly I was like, you are going to talk about this as if I thought I would make it this far. [01:53:31] Speaker B: In the talk without it coming up. [01:53:33] Speaker C: Without it Coming up. All right. So the whole thing about nervous system regulation is the goal is to make you more resilient in the face of uncertainty. And the measures that we use to look at that are largely that heart rate variability that I mentioned. So I'm going to say it increased heart rate variability again 500 times. And after this, you'll never want to hear that again. [01:53:58] Speaker B: Sure. [01:54:00] Speaker C: And I kind of compiled these into some little groups. I don't know if other people would do it this way. And whatever. You asked me to do it. So you have to deal with what. [01:54:11] Speaker B: I. I feel good about it. I'm down with whatever system of organization you've decided on. [01:54:16] Speaker C: All right. Honestly, there's some. Some cross talk between my groups even. I was like, I don't really know. Anyway, so first is breath work. So slow, deep breathing exercises activate your vagus nerve, and so they activate your parasympathetic nervous system, and they can improve your heart rate variability. From what I read, if anyone is telling you any specific. Breath work is what you need to do, that's not supported by the research. I actually found a. Like, a review paper, and they looked at several breathwork techniques, and they said they really couldn't see any difference. [01:54:52] Speaker B: It's the breathing itself. [01:54:54] Speaker C: Yeah. It's just slow breathing. So all that really matters is that you're slowing down your breathing. And I also read a book recently, and I was reading it before you asked me to do this, and then, as just happens, there's happened to be a section on breathing in it, because it's about how to. Winter, I think is what it's called. [01:55:09] Speaker B: Okay. [01:55:10] Speaker C: It's by this woman who's like, whole thing is reframing how you think about winter since winter is a hard time. [01:55:15] Speaker B: Right. [01:55:16] Speaker C: How you can learn to appreciate winter. I'm like, okay. And she did talk about breathwork in it briefly. And I was like, oh, my God. And then I was looking into the research, and I was like, oh, shit. Well, it actually might do something. [01:55:28] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. Which I think, like, we can. Again, we can, like, feel that, right? [01:55:33] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:55:34] Speaker B: When you're stressed out or things like that, I think we kind of have an instinct to, you know. [01:55:39] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:55:40] Speaker B: Like, try to calm it through breathing in one way or another. So, you know, that makes sense. It's interesting to see that it's like, there's not a trick to it. No, it's the actual slow, deep breathing that does it. There's no, like, magic pattern of ways of doing it or anything like that. It's Just the breathing. [01:55:59] Speaker C: Exactly. And like, in everything, I'm going to tell you almost everything. Either you're gonna need a clinician or you can just do it at home. Like, you do not need a wellness influencer to tell you how to do anything. Take it from me for free. And don't follow any of those pages. Yes, I'm on board. I don't know, it reminds me of the. The quote from the Princess Bride. He says something along the lines of, life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something. [01:56:27] Speaker B: Exactly. 100%. And that, I mean to your point, too, like, I think the thing that I sent you, that they had like, a website and they do, like, seminars and like, oh, why don't you sign up for my, like, you know, my program that will teach you how to do X, Y and Z. You know, things like that, which are probably things like breathing and, you know, whatever else you have for us here that ultimately is based in, like, stuff that maybe works, but also that, like, you don't need them for. You don't need to pay $300 for a course to do. [01:57:02] Speaker C: Don't. Don't pay anyone anything. And also, like, like, again, I just want to. I've already said this, but I'm gonna say it again. This isn't gonna, like, fix your nervous system. It's dysregulated. It can help you over the long term, improve your heart rate variability, like, from wherever you start. So again, a lot of things might be impacting if you have a dysregulated autonomic nervous system, a lot of things can be impacting that. And this can help a little bit. All of these things. I view it as like one tool in a toolbox. [01:57:33] Speaker B: Like, right. [01:57:34] Speaker C: You know, so I did not say that if you did breath work, you would fix your nervous system. Ta da. [01:57:41] Speaker B: You're regulated. [01:57:42] Speaker C: And anyone who says that is batshit. All right, so the next group is mindfulness and meditation. I just threw them together because people kept talking about meditation and mindfulness practices, which seems to me to be meditation. So. [01:57:57] Speaker B: Right, that's true. Every time someone talks about mindfulness, they're just talking about meditation. Meditation, yeah. [01:58:03] Speaker C: So these are linked to decreased inflammatory activity at the level of gene expression, decreased brain inflammation, better memory, and increased ability to learn new information. Also linked to increased heart rate variability. So there is science backing that this can activate your vagus nerve and especially when there is breath work involved. So, and as an added bonus, I think one of the reasons that this works is that it involves interoception so that's just your ability to monitor your internal states. So usually what mindfulness and meditation does is it makes you think about how your body is feeling. [01:58:41] Speaker B: Right. [01:58:42] Speaker C: And particularly autistic people can be very bad at this. So actually doing something like that can get you more in touch with, oh, I'm hungry. I'm actually feeling very tired right now. But I hadn't noticed. So those types of things can be useful. I even saw a study where they, they use mindfulness in breast cancer survivors and they had them do a six week mindfulness intervention and they did see decreases in like stress, depression, increases in well being. This would all probably be self report, but also decreases inflammatory gene expression. [01:59:20] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah. [01:59:22] Speaker C: And they also saw changes in something called, and I'm probably mispronouncing this because I didn't bother to look up how to pronounce it, but it's eudemonic well being. And so that's the idea that your life has meaning and purpose. [01:59:33] Speaker B: Okay. [01:59:34] Speaker C: And that's associated with changes in gene expression as well. [01:59:37] Speaker B: Fascinating. [01:59:39] Speaker C: You can also do mindful movement, which I put under this category. And even though, spoiler alert, the next category is movement. These things, they all seem to be really related. So mindful movement, what I'm talking about is things like yoga, tai chi, qigong. I found one paper in particular making a very strong case for qigong for low sympathetic and high parasympathetic. [01:59:59] Speaker B: Was it from Falun Gong people? [02:00:03] Speaker C: I hope not. I didn't look that far into it. [02:00:07] Speaker B: Fair enough. [02:00:08] Speaker C: Yeah. And then, I mean there's most, the most of the research is going to be on yoga. So yeah, there's a bunch of studies out there linking yoga to like stress reduction, but it also legitimately has shown decreases in perceived stress and increases in resilience and quality of life. Though I don't know how they studied that. This was from like a review paper and people. Oh no, no, no. That was an article on people with inflammatory bowel disease. But I don't have time to look into the details so you can decide. There's also a lot of literature linking yoga to like inflammatory markers, like reduction of inflammatory markers, those inflammatory cytokines, those proteins that I keep talking about. So it's out there. Movement. Well, also just. Do you have a question? [02:00:59] Speaker A: Sorry, no, not at all. [02:01:01] Speaker B: That was a wow. [02:01:02] Speaker C: Oh wow. [02:01:02] Speaker A: That was a wow. Yeah, I'm gonna. Corey, are you. Does this come as a surprise to you? Because I feel it might. [02:01:12] Speaker B: Well, I think it's interesting because on the One hand, yes, and on the one hand, no. Because I think there are elements of this, of what you've been saying, Eileen, that feel like before we talked about it as, like, the nervous system or whatever, these were kind of common wisdom about, you know, how you deal with, like, somatic responses to stress. Right. Like, we've all. I think we have known for a long time that these, like, stress is a thing that has negative health impacts. And I couldn't have pointed to, like, the science that you've. You've given here. But, you know, I think that this is kind of been a thing that people have known about for a minute, you know, and what you were saying about, like, cortisol. I know that I've heard about that before. And so, like, these ideas that there are reactions and whatnot that are related. Nothing that you've said about how to solve those things or, like, what kind of, like, practices you can do is unusual to me. What is interesting is the role that the autonomic nervous system plays into it, which, you know, is fascinating and I didn't know and where that connection comes from. But also, I think, to your point, kind of at the beginning of talking about this, that you said, like, these. These wellness influencers and whatnot are taking ideas that are real and maybe misinterpreting them and the degree to which. [02:02:39] Speaker A: Packaging them as. [02:02:41] Speaker B: Packaging them. [02:02:42] Speaker A: This one simple trick. [02:02:43] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So I think it's a little bit of both. Like, I'm surprised to hear the degree to which this idea of dysregulation is a thing and what role that actually plays in things and how there are actions and activities that we do that impact that. It's definitely more than I would have expected, for sure. [02:03:05] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, I'm not. I'm surprised that some of these things that I'm talking about now actually have, like, people who have researched them and found anything that seems real for some of them, I am very surprised. For the other stuff, I kind of like, when you sent me the stuff, I was like, like, okay, they're. They're misinterpreting this. But also, like, I don't know, I just. I have completely lost my point. Had one lost it. This is the point where I say the thing that mattered. [02:03:40] Speaker B: So close. I mean, we're talking about the, like, the surprise of finding out what place that. [02:03:45] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, you sent me the. The stuff. And just the thing that bothered me was, like, how causal a lot of it was. And then, like, one of the things you sent me did something that is Highly triggering for me. And at the end of what they said, they said, read that again. Anytime I say anything that says, read that again. [02:04:02] Speaker B: I think that was what. Yeah. What kind of clicked for me, too, when I saw it on there. [02:04:09] Speaker C: God, it's awful. And so that's what made me go, ah, no, no, no. And so. And also, like, I was aware of, like, autonomic nervous stuff. I actually worked in a stress lab for a short time as a grad student, and so that's why I would have been aware of it. But the. The. The way that, like, the last time I thought about it in, like, the actual literature and reading literature would have been 17 years ago, right? So for me, I was like, holy crap. Like, I was like, oh, this will be easy. I'll just tell them how the HPA axis works, works. And then I'm like, me. That is not where people are at anymore. All right, I guess I'll learn how this works. [02:04:52] Speaker B: By the way, let me just say what the. When I read what I sent to her, you are going to understand why everything just was like. Like alarms. Your immune system weakens every time you override a feeling that was designed to protect you. Read that again. [02:05:10] Speaker A: Off. [02:05:14] Speaker B: Every time you override a feeling that was designed to protect you, your immune system weakens. [02:05:24] Speaker C: Stupid. It's like something like that. It's, like, made to sound smart, but. [02:05:28] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. [02:05:29] Speaker C: Think about it. It is. [02:05:31] Speaker A: So if you actually, ironically, if you do read it again, then you realize. Wait a minute. [02:05:37] Speaker B: The first comment on this. This is such an important reminder. The body speaks in sensation and emotion long before it speaks in symptoms. When women learn to honor those signals instead of overriding them, the immune system can soften, inflammation can quiet, and true healing becomes possible. Like, I feel like when I read this, like, I was making it sound smarter than what he was actually reading in this. Like, it's a lot dumber than the stuff that Eileen has been talking about here. When we really get into, like, what this stuff is about and this idea that, like, you know, you need to regulate your immune system, your nervous system, and then if you don't, like. And you personally. Like Eileen was saying, like, when you personally override this feeling, you're fucking up your. Your immune system and your nervous system. And that's like. That's a you thing. You need to learn to, like, yes, listen to stuff. And that's going to fix your immune system. [02:06:37] Speaker C: Absolutely stupid. [02:06:38] Speaker A: But the stuff that. The stuff that works is the stuff that we know works anyway. How many times have you said it, Corrigan, that you can tell within five minutes of us starting an episode whether or not I've been exercising that week. [02:06:49] Speaker B: Right. Yeah, exactly right. [02:06:52] Speaker A: And there's no need to read that again. It's. It's. No, it's extant. It's. It's clear. [02:06:58] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [02:07:00] Speaker C: So the comment section is a very dangerous place for me because either it's hilarious or just infuriary. Triggering. [02:07:08] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. This one I think I would file under infuriating, which is why I immediately was like, Eileen, Yeah, help. [02:07:18] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I read it. I didn't go to the comments section. I just read what you just read to everyone and went, ugh, off. Okay. Just immediate wincing, physical reaction. [02:07:31] Speaker B: Because nothing that you have said to us here comes anywhere close to that. The idea that, like, you're. You need to be in control of. I mean, it's being in control of your window of tolerance. Right. Like, you need to be in control of, like, the feeling itself. You know, you need to, like, when that feeling hits you, you have a choice. And that's going to decide whether what you're talking about here is there are contributing factors. There are stressors. There are, you know, things that you can do that kind of put you in a state where that window maybe is wider or where, you know, you're not as at risk of these becoming dangerous. And what this is saying is once that fight or flight hits, what you do with it is what changes your body, essentially. [02:08:28] Speaker C: Yeah, right. That's. That's definitely not what I'm saying at all. So. [02:08:36] Speaker A: Right. [02:08:36] Speaker C: Yeah. And like, again, I already said this too, but I. Again, soapboxes. So everything says chronic, prolonged. [02:08:45] Speaker B: Right. [02:08:45] Speaker C: You know, heightened. Like, these people are talking about you doing one tiny thing. They're talking about an acute stressor almost, which is not a problem at all in any way. Like, that's just. [02:08:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:08:59] Speaker C: I mean, it's your own business, in my opinion. [02:09:02] Speaker B: And it feels like, you know, even some of the things, again, that are, like, good thoughts. Right. Like, so, you know, a lot of this is about safety and things like that. And if you are with someone who makes you feel unsafe in some way, whether that's a friend or, you know, a romantic relationship or whatever, the idea that, you know, you should get out of that and that's causing you stress and things like that, like, you know. Yeah, absolutely. But it feels like that is, again, different from these kind of chronic stressors that you are talking about in the situation. Unless we have reached the point of, like, abuse. Right. Like, that's a different thing than, like, I have a girlfriend who I don't like, you know, feel super safe with. I have a boyfriend I don't feel super safe with. You know, like, that's. That's not the level that is driving you to the point of, like, now you're having a reaction from your immune system. [02:09:59] Speaker C: Yeah, no, it's all cumulative and it's all, like, personalized. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's hard to study, which is why I talked about how your perception matters. Matters. Right. And how you perceive things to be like, it's your body, it's reacting. Right. So, again, I find a lot of things stressful. I probably find many things stressful that people listening to the cast would find ridiculous. And that's just my truth. Okay. [02:10:27] Speaker B: Right. Yeah, But. [02:10:29] Speaker C: But I don't feel that I am often in a state where, like, I can't shut down my sympathetic nervous system response. [02:10:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:10:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:10:40] Speaker C: So, hey, maybe I'm in the frequent activation category, which can lead to these other problems. But it's not like any one response I have to, I don't know, talking on this podcast whenever Mark keeps saying how great I am, and it stresses me out a lot. [02:10:55] Speaker B: Right. Like, that is not causing you to. [02:10:58] Speaker C: That's not going to give weakened response. And. [02:11:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Get heart disease. Yeah, Yeah. [02:11:02] Speaker C: I don't know. It's stupid. Anyway, so exercise, it's some of the similar stuff. Increase heart rate variability. I read that in this case, things that are not necessarily repetitive might be helpful. They said dancing, swimming, playing a sport. Yeah, but it doesn't really matter. Is the. Is the end result kind of like the breath work? Because different types of activity can activate your vagus nerve in different ways. So, like, if you're lifting weights, for example, you're doing something called proprioception, which is just knowing where your body is in space. [02:11:36] Speaker B: I know a lot about that. Having EDS and how little of it I have. [02:11:41] Speaker C: Yes. And that is autonomic. So, you know, things like climb, like a climbing wall, yoga would fall under that category of, like, where your body is in space. That also works. So it doesn't have to be dancing, swimming, running is great, like, whatever you want to do. Going for a walk. The Bruce McEwen, the guy that did the allostatic overload stuff, in an interview of him that I read, he was just talking about how much help a lot of people would get if they just walked for an hour a day. [02:12:09] Speaker B: Right. [02:12:10] Speaker C: I mean, it really doesn't matter. Just Go do something. [02:12:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:12:14] Speaker C: Another category, I called it CO regulation. And so this can be a lot of things. So I. It could be. It could be hanging out with your friend, it could be spending time with your pet, it could be going to therapy. There's a lot of stuff out there for cognitive behavioral therapy and mind body therapy for reductions in inflammation and improved heart rate variability and stuff. And again, I read a review and they said they looked at like 56 different psychosocial interventions and found an overall positive effect. So it's kind of like, find something that works for you. [02:12:50] Speaker B: Right? [02:12:50] Speaker C: Yeah, go for it. Also, pro social interventions can. Can reduce inflammation. So this is things like volunteering, performing acts of kindness, being part of some sort of community group. [02:13:03] Speaker A: My goodness. None of which are expensive and. Or should be charge. [02:13:09] Speaker B: Right, exactly. Again, you do not need to pay someone for this and you don't need. [02:13:15] Speaker C: To do all of these things. [02:13:16] Speaker B: Right. [02:13:17] Speaker C: Another thing that I read about is that like, meditation can actually stress some people out. That's me out there. It's me too. Who feel like if they're doing something slightly wrong, then then they can't deal with it. And so often, like guided meditation, I'm like, I can't. I can't do this. They're asking me to do a thing I can't do. [02:13:34] Speaker B: Right. [02:13:35] Speaker C: So for those people, you probably shouldn't add meditation to your list of. For example, and for some people, like, I think, if I'm not mistaken, Mark, you've talked about trying cognitive behavioral therapy and it not doing anything for you, then don't do it again. [02:13:52] Speaker A: Because just like you described, I was worried that I wasn't doing it right. I was, I was told that I should be able to, you know, focus on one thing to the exclusion of other things, and I just wasn't able to do it. It was just making me more stressed. [02:14:05] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. And there's a subset of people for which that's true. Even, like some people will stress out about breath work because a lot of time, like if you do something, you're supposed to hold your breath in for a certain number of seconds and exhale for a certain number of seconds. But from what I've read, you don't need to do that. You just need to slowly breathe, Just. [02:14:22] Speaker B: Slow it down, breathe it out, just slow it down. [02:14:24] Speaker C: You don't have to count. You really can't mess it up, is what I'm trying to tell you. And please don't pay some wellness influencer to tell you how to do it. Yeah, the Eudaimonic. Well, being the meaning in life piece is here. And I mean, I didn't really intend to necessarily talk about it a lot, but I think you've probably seen that, like, the biggest predictor of health is your. Your social life, basically the health of your social life. So I think how this is coming into it is. Is with that, and it's with you feeling like your life matters, that your life is valuable, that it's meaningful, that it is, you know, useful for you to be here. All those things are kind of in that vein. Okay. There's also something called heart rate variability biofeedback. And so if you talk about therapy or heart rate variability biofeedback, you're going to need, like, a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a clinician of some kind. Everything else on this list, you can just do it for free at home. Right. This would be in a case. It's often used for people with chronic pain, people with really bad anxiety disorders, ptsd. Also, you can do not heart rate variability. I think it's EEG biofeedback for epilepsy. So it's something that basically you're. You're looking at your own physiological response on a screen, or sometimes it's an auditory cue and you. I actually did this in a lab for. When I was teaching a teacher's assistant for Intro to Psych, we would have these little machines, and they basically functioned like EKGs, which is how you measure heart rate variability. And then we'd have people do different things during the lab, like sit there and breathe slowly and, like, watch their heart rate go down. And then we'd have them get up and, like, I don't know, do a jumping jack or something. And, you know, you watch it go up. And over time, being hooked up to a machine and watching yourself regulate your response, you can get to a point where you can just do it without a machine. [02:16:12] Speaker B: Oh, interesting. [02:16:15] Speaker C: You'll learn kind of like how it feels and stuff. So I never got to that point. And none of the students like one lab for a class. So. But this is what you're supposed to do in a clinical setting. The idea is you go in, you do this biofeedback. They hook you up to an EKG or EEG or whatever it is, and they walk you through, like, here's. Okay, look. Look at your physiological response. Look at it changing. So then you can be in a stressful situation, Mark. You can have the slightest inconvenience happen to you at work, and you can be like, no, I'VE got this. I can lower my heart rate and maybe I can respond to whoever it is without snapping at them. [02:16:50] Speaker B: You know, Interesting. [02:16:53] Speaker C: That is something you can do. There's also, and I don't even want to talk about this because I read about it and I still don't believe it even though I found studies for it. That's cold exposure. [02:17:08] Speaker B: Cold exposure, yes. [02:17:10] Speaker C: And this was in the how to Winter book too. I don't know why I'm talking about this book I didn't even really like so much, but it just lined up. [02:17:17] Speaker B: It just. Yeah. Happens to be right. [02:17:19] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. But studies haven't shown. Shown that cold exposure increases your vagal activity and your heart rate variability. I want to be very clear that like the book that I read talks about winter swimming, which is like jumping in the water when you know. And you can't do that if you have certain health conditions. Right. But I've seen other people suggest and I do not know if it works because all the literature that I read was pretty much a full body or most of your body exposure to cold. But I've read that you can just put like an ice cube on your neck or turn your shower cold at the end of it for a little bit of time and have it be something very similar without being quite so dangerous for someone who does have maybe not the best physical health. [02:18:04] Speaker B: I have heard this before again. I mean I've never looked at studies or things like that, but yeah, that kind of shock of the cold and things like that being something that can. I don't know. I. No idea why. Scientifically. [02:18:17] Speaker A: I've always seen it spoken about by people trying to sell you a plunge tub, which you have, which I had. It's gone. [02:18:25] Speaker C: Oh, did you get rid of it? [02:18:26] Speaker A: Oh yeah. I'd use it twice. [02:18:28] Speaker C: Did you sell it? [02:18:30] Speaker A: No, it just gathered mold and got thrown out. [02:18:34] Speaker B: I, I do occasionally wonder. Every now and again I'll see like an athlete in an ice tub and I'm like, I wonder if whatever happened to Mark plunged. [02:18:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [02:18:43] Speaker B: Well, we all get caught up by the wellness people from time to time. Let's be real. [02:18:48] Speaker C: I don't know I'm saying this and I still am like hi, Yeah, I need to read more about it. [02:18:52] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. We won't take that as gospel. And please don't go cold plunging if you don't know whether your body can handle it. [02:18:58] Speaker C: Yeah. Like if you have any like heart. [02:19:00] Speaker B: Related conditions, don't do this, maybe don't do that. [02:19:04] Speaker C: I read some papers on hummingbird humming, bruh. [02:19:08] Speaker B: I'm a. I mean, I think this is like any autistic person who stims understands this. Yeah, absolutely. Repetitive things. Humming. Oh, I love the feel when I'm stressed out of just. [02:19:21] Speaker C: And your vagus nerve enervates your vocal cords. So people say that's why they think it works. Singing. But stimming also makes sense from. From a movement perspective, I think. [02:19:32] Speaker A: Think. [02:19:32] Speaker C: I think. I mean, I think that's why autistic people do it. [02:19:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a stress reliever. It's a stress situation, Right? [02:19:38] Speaker C: Yeah, they do it because it helps. [02:19:39] Speaker B: So. Yes. [02:19:42] Speaker C: And then the very last thing that I wanted to talk about was something called reappraisal. And this one's a little bit iffy. So there's this thing called the. I don't even know why I put this in here. Biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat. Every time I get to something like this, I'm like, why did I put these stupid technical terms in here? [02:20:02] Speaker B: I don't want to say this. [02:20:03] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't want to say this. Anyway, so basically it's the idea that if during some sort of stressful event or threat or challenge, if you feel like you have the resources to meet the demand of that stressor, then the physiological response will be somewhat different than if you don't feel like you do. Yeah, that makes sense. They're claiming that, like, maybe, you know, if you feel like you're ready to meet the challenge, your blood vessels will stay more dilated, whereas they might constrict if you feel like you don't. So there's some stuff out there on this and there's also some, like, correlational evidence between showing how you feel about stress and our mortality rate. Again, correlational, not causal saying. Like if you say you are under a lot of stress and you feel like stress is a bad thing, your mortality rate's higher or your risk is higher than if you think stress is not a bad thing. [02:21:00] Speaker B: Right. [02:21:01] Speaker A: So many of these things have become part of the kind of the vernacular that people use when trying to dealing with stuff. [02:21:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:21:10] Speaker A: When. When you're in a situation of deep stress, people say out loud, Right. Let me just take a breath. [02:21:16] Speaker B: Right. [02:21:17] Speaker A: Because people do that because it works. Saying to yourself, right, look, I got this. You are confirming to yourself that you have the tools necessary with which to deal with a particular situation. This is. This is DIY nervous system regulation, right? [02:21:35] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's. It's a thing People have kind of done instinctively for like all of human existence, Right? Yeah. And science is just kind of explaining to us, like, why, why do you take a deep breath when you, when you feel this way? Why do you give yourself a pep talk? You know, things like that? This is what is going on in your body when you do that. [02:22:01] Speaker C: Absolutely. And so my thing for this one is like, I found a review paper from 2019 and it looked at all the available literature on reappraisal interventions and they basically didn't have a consensus on whether or not there's actually a physiological response. However, it's kind of hard to study and like people report a psychological benefit. And so from my perspective, if it helps you get through it, even if it's not actually regulating your nervous system. Right. It's worth throwing on here as an option, right? [02:22:31] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. [02:22:32] Speaker C: That's why I put it last and I just tossed it on at the end. [02:22:35] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:22:35] Speaker C: Maybe someone will find some physiological benefit even if it doesn't, if it helps you to be like, okay, I have to do this really stressful thing at work today, but I know that I can do it. [02:22:45] Speaker B: Yes. [02:22:46] Speaker C: Like whatever you do, you man. [02:22:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm a big silver walk into. So whether or not, whether or not it physiologically has any impact, I don't know. But psychologically, yes, I absolutely use that as a way of, you know, regulating stress and, you know, anything, exercise, whatever, very much. You know, you got this, you have the skills and the knowledge to be able to complete this. You have the strength to do it. So, you know, it's a good, it's a good like positive self talk thing to do. Even if it has nothing to do with your nervous system. [02:23:24] Speaker C: Exactly. So, yeah, I just felt like it was valuable to put on there. But yeah, other than that, that's, that's most of what I saw. Like, I've seen lots of things, like just random things that people talk about that you should do. Those are the things that in the time I had, I was able to find any research supporting it, any at all. [02:23:43] Speaker B: So no, this is really enlightening. I think, you know, you've given me a sense of like the degree to which people talking about this are correct. Right. Like that these are things that, you know, various elements of your life, your choices, your stressors, you know, the environment that you are in actively do have an impact on your nervous system, which then is part of an interconnected web of other things that can increase the risk of negative outcomes. They don't promise negative outcomes, but they increase the risk of negative outcomes, which I think is to a degree surprising. And then on the other hand, you know, you also sort of validated here though, that when, you know, this idea that we can kind of flip a switch through our self talk or by recognizing our, like by simply acknowledging the feelings that we are meant to have, that we can then regulate our nervous system and prevent our immune system from, you know, failing on us. That, that inclination that I had in seeing a lot of the promises made by these people was correct. [02:24:51] Speaker A: So I think yes, which the, the issue is an industry which has woefully oversimplified. [02:24:59] Speaker C: Right. [02:24:59] Speaker A: Simplified and tried to monetize monetization and oversimplification. [02:25:04] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. And I think, you know, that's ultimately, I think like, I love the way that you broke this down into, like these are kinds of things that you, you do have some level of control over that you can do to manage stress, which then impacts this. Like, these are, as we've discussed, like a lot of stuff that we kind of in intuitively know and that are free for us to do, as opposed to sort of expecting, which I think can cause a lot of stress in and of itself, expecting that someone is going to fix you through, you know, a course of teaching you how to do these things or whatever, which, you know, like, I saw that a lot with Mark when he was trying to figure out, like, you know, your sleep, your, you know, various issues, why am I depressed, why am I this, that and the other thing that the, like, that things weren't working, increased your stress about the thing in the first place 100%. And so I think that that's one of the dangers of kind of the expectation that like, oh, if I can learn these, you know, these, this one weird trick, you know, I'm going to be able to regulate my nervous system and thus, you know, live better. I think that that's like a, that's a road that you don't really want to go down when ultimately, as with everything we know that our systems are interconnected and a lot of these sort of things, whether it's those sort of mindfulness and movement and things like that, they're all things we know we're supposed to do anyway. You know, it's like we know we're supposed to exercise and, you know, do things that, you know, are positive and limit our stress. We live in a society that makes that hard, obviously. And that's, that's more of the issue than the like, choices that you individually make is kind of structures that make it difficult for you to make those positive choices in the long run. [02:27:01] Speaker C: Absolutely. [02:27:03] Speaker A: 50 million podcasts out there, friends, but this is the only one, the only one in which you will hear radiation, hyper diarrhea and DIY wellness techniques. The same fucking episode. [02:27:18] Speaker C: Nukes and nervous systems. [02:27:20] Speaker B: Nukes and nervous systems. There it is. Thank you so much, Eileen. I know everyone at home is just so pleased to hear your voice again and hear your insights, and we love having you and we won't be strangers for so long. This time it was. We had, like, a whole year with no Ilene in it. So we will never let that happen again. We'll, you know, force you to come back and talk to us again. [02:27:44] Speaker A: Eileen, that was thoroughly adequate. Thank you. [02:27:46] Speaker B: Thoroughly adequate. [02:27:48] Speaker C: I was about to say, Ken, next time can you do the intro instead of Mark? Because you probably won't convince everyone that I'm some sort of, like, genius and. [02:27:59] Speaker B: I'm like, no, I'm less Jeffrey from Knight's Tale about it. So we'll make it work. And dear friends, thank you so much for being here. Next week, we will have Sheryl Weichel on. Last week, Marco had to get a tooth out or get an abscess dealt with, so we could not do the episode as planned. But next week, we're gonna. We're gonna tackle some prison abolition and lawyer. [02:28:28] Speaker A: Yes. And expect a snack coming up this week, during which Corey and I will discuss the new Sam Raimi horror. Send help, among other things. And I'll also talk a little bit more in depth about what went on in my jaw as well, because it was gnarly and you'll enjoy that. [02:28:41] Speaker B: Out. [02:28:43] Speaker A: So until then, yes, stay spooky. Thanks, Eileen. Stay spooky.