Rest and digest OR fight or flight
Rest and digest and fight or flight are “either-or” metabolic processes that take over the functions of the body, typically involuntarily. You can’t experience both at the same time. So what exactly does this mean?
If you were to come upon a lion, face to face (not likely, I know, but we have many hypothetical lions in our lives), so if you were to encounter a captivating, yet intensely frightening lion, your instincts would naturally kick in.
You probably wouldn’t say, “Hey kitty kitty” and call him over to you. No, instincts tell you it’s time to run and fast - this is fight or flight. It would be involuntary and very appropriate in this case. You wouldn’t even think twice, your body instantly kicks into gear sending all the necessary hormones rushing, and without hesitation or warning your circulation would literally change pattern! Your blood would immediately be sent to your arms and legs to facilitate your response to run. It all happens in split seconds. This is part of our ancestral instincts. And it serves a very good purpose, as you can see. We may not encounter lions every day, but fight or flight doesn’t require extreme situations to become triggered. Even every day stressors can set off hormones that activate glands and organs to help us spring into action or defend the body against attack. You may not be aware that having sugar, allergenic foods or substances, caffeine, cigarettes, or too much alcohol or other drugs produces the same fight or flight chemistry. When adrenaline runs for whatever reason, blood flows to the muscles and the action centers of the brain; heart rate and blood pressure increase. Blood flow for digestion decreases.
Did you know that activating this survival mechanism actually impairs health?
It’s true. When you go into fight or flight, you aren’t able to also be in rest and digest. Well, clearly it’s obvious you aren’t in a state of rest, if you are expected to run from a lion. And quite honestly, this shouldn’t really be a problem for most people in every day life, because fight or flight should only be triggered during appropriate circumstances. This would be ideal, but sadly, isn’t the reality for many. The other half of the equation in rest and digest, is digest. While it may be obvious that you aren’t resting if you are frantic and running around like a chicken with your head cut off, or stressing over the bills, you might not even realize that the metabolic process responsible for digestion has just been halted, because you are stressing over the bills. I bet you never made that connection before, did you? Most people don’t, until someone like me comes along and rains on their parade.
When parasympathetic activity is free to take over, healing and regeneration occur. This is when our body performs activities like digestion, detoxification, elimination, and building immunity. You may associate digestion with feeling satiated after a meal, but more importantly digestion is a process that extracts nutrients from our diet, it feeds our microbiome and it participates in cell regeneration among other important long term survival tasks. So you could say rest and digest is also a survival mechanism. Our body is literally in repair during rest and digest. Thankfully we don’t encounter a lot of real lions, but think about the hypothetical “lions” in your life.
Your “lions” might be paying the bills because it triggers fear of losing your home and your stability, or maybe your relationship with a significant other or a family member is strained or downright frightening, perhaps the deteriorating health of a loved one has you in constant turmoil or even just requires ‘round the clock care, and so on. If you are stressed, you are actively in instinctual fight or flight. Remember, it’s involuntary. So although the response may even be appropriate for all of the stressful situations in your life, it could be that you are in fight of flight more hours than you are in rest and digest. This obvious imbalance has consequences.
Now that you understand the concept behind conscientious fight or flight, which we may or may not be aware of and may even be able to control, I want to introduce you to the more insidious and sneaky chronic fight or flight.
The sticking point in pattern conditioning is that the more the stress pathways of the sympathetic nervous system are triggered, the more your body will find the fight or flight pattern easy to fall into and repeat itself involuntarily and usually without warning. It can literally become an engrained pattern in your life, creating a dangerous loop. Some might call this habit, but I prefer to see it as neural pathway pairing. 😉 What is actually happening in the brain might help you understand why learning about tools to help you consciously activate rest and digest is so important.
Neural pathways can be developed in pairs, when two things frequently occur at the same time, creating a conditioned response. This paired pathway literally becomes a deep physical groove in the brain which grows deeper as it is used. Eventually that pathway has a mind of it’s own and doesn’t require conscious awareness to become activated. For example, in the Pavlov’s Dogs science experiment, a bell was rung while they were being fed, repeatedly. Before long, the dogs began salivating when the bell was rung. They didn’t even need to see or smell the food, which originally was the only trigger for salivation. Interesting when you consider how many times this could be inadvertently happening in life, right? In the examples of stress conditioning above, maybe when you see the mailman arrive, you know that collections agency may have sent you yet another notice and you are developing a neural pathway connecting those two events, creating a now predictable and involuntary stress response pattern. For many people the conditioning is much more frightening, like a war veteran’s survival conditioning triggering PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) when innocent neighborhood kids are setting off fireworks around the Fourth of July. It began as an appropriate survival response, after all gun shots are an appropriate trigger for the fight or flight response, but after the war ended the neural pathway remained deeply engrained and now that appropriate response is inappropriately triggered. This is in fact what PTSD is at the core, it’s the pairing of an event with a a predictable outcome that has the propensity to repeat itself.
So we can see how even everyday stressors can perpetuate conditioned responses of chronic fight or flight and how easily this can get out of hand. “Stress” doesn’t only come in the form of emotional thought patterns, the body can experience stress from environmental factors out of our conscious awareness too.
Now, I want to highlight all of the children who have PANS/PANDAS, Autism, ADHD, learning disorders and other conditions where anxiety (an involuntary stress response) is a common symptom. Although it’s not uncommon for an adult to figure out and identify triggers to their anxiety, children don’t usually understand how anxiety develops or what triggered them, and it may be very different from what we would perceive as the cause. Children naturally act out since they can’t articulate what is really going on. When was the last time a 3 year old said, “Hey mom, we need a sit down about this involuntary anxiety I’m experiencing, it’s really out of control and I’d like to come up with a plan to do something about it.” 😳
Anxiety usually appears to be an inappropriate response to an otherwise harmless event in life. We see this inappropriate response in: germ phobias, eating disorders, the need to control situations, OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), and for a child on the spectrum something as simple as order disruption and over or under stimulation of the senses can provoke anxiety…all of which are triggering the sympathetic nervous system to go into fight or flight, thereby preventing rest and digest! Our perception is that it is inappropriate, because it doesn’t make sense to us, it’s irrational, however, it IS appropriate in the scope of what is really going on inside the body. A symptom is an expressed red flag being put out there by the body so that you will take notice and do something about it. Out of proportion anxiety about every day events is a symptom of a bigger problem.
It’s important to dig deeper when something like anxiety is present for children and adults alike, because it is often rooted in medical health even though it indirectly effects mental health. This is the unfortunate result of being out of balance with nature. Anxiety is commonly experienced in toxic dis-ease like: mold toxicity, heavy metal toxicity, autoimmunity, Lyme disease, MCAD (mast cell activation disorder), food sensitivities, chemical sensitivities, and pathogenic overgrowth conditions like bacteria, candida and parasites. It is also very common for one or more of these things to be at the root of many chronic illnesses. The triggers may be many, putting the person in a holding pattern of chronic fight or flight. How can a child grow, develop, comprehend, focus and absorb nutrients in this state? They can’t.
Although anxiety is one of many forms of involuntary fight or flight, and it is often completely irrational, it can be healed. Involuntary does NOT equate to irreparable. This is really important to comprehend and believe in, because this belief is going to set the stage for your recovery.
So clearly, getting the triggers under control is an essential first step. It’s important to understand here that fight or flight is not always an emotional event, there are many potential fight or flight triggers that are exempt from the conscientious part of or mind. For example, pollen can trigger the sympathetic nervous system, aka - fight or flight. This isn’t like the lion per say, but it’s response on a body that is inappropriately triggered by pollen is not different from the lion experience. See what I mean? So there doesn’t have to be a clear and present danger on a conscious level, it can be occurring silently and repeatedly.
For those with MCAD (which may be the cause of another disorder more commonly recognized as a mental illness), this is an ongoing battle all day every day, and the most important way to calm the sympathetic nervous system is to eliminate triggers as you identify them. If the burden can be managed enough to allow the body to go into rest and digest more frequently than fight or flight, healing is bound to begin to occur in baby steps. It’s often miraculous what body can recover from merely by tipping the balance from fight or flight to rest and digest! This can be an incredible task, but is absolutely worth your time and effort. This was the foundation of our recovery.
While everyone’s journey is going to look different, there are some steps I would encourage everyone to take, in order to unravel the mysteries causing dysfunction within the central nervous system.
Regardless of the cause, reducing inflammation is paramount to lightening the burden on the body. This must start with what is on the end of your fork. Everything we put in our bodies has the potential to be healing or harmful. It’s a literal fork in the road, every time you raise that fork to your mouth. Which path do you want to take? By choosing options that are healthier for your and/or your child’s body, you are encouraging healing while reducing inflammation. ALL dietary interventions should begin with an avoidance of sugar (both refined and natural, at least at first), preservatives, flavorings, and food dyes which all come in prepackaged foods. Once this foundation has been solidly established, you can check into other dietary interventions that eliminate foods known to cause systemic inflammation.
Changing the diet can result in some pretty amazing improvements. With our older son, it was like a fog was lifted from his mind, but it didn’t come without temporary detox, also known as a healing crisis. For our younger son, avoiding certain food chemicals is essential to his well-being, so much so that can be like Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. You have to experience it yourself to comprehend the potential for the body to heal itself, but I promise you that once you fully explore this area, it will come with benefits you can’t deny. Choosing to stick with it or taking it further, however, is on you. You can only feel as good as your habits allow you to. Sometimes the removal of one or even two single food items isn’t enough, keep digging.Gently and regularly detox the body. When we have more toxins going in than being eliminated, that accumulation will create inflammation in the body. Here is a very basic presentation of how toxins effect our bodies. First, you must understand what a toxin is. Toxins consist of anything that the body cannot metabolize or anything that is foreign to the body. Sources of toxins are: food, water, noise, dramatic changes in weather, EMFs causing excessive radiation, emotional trauma, even an excess of normal chemicals in the body, and metatoxins which are the result of metabolized foods that cannot be eliminated. It is a commonly known fact that our bodies are 70% water. However, in actuality, that number is greater. I learned during a lecture by Dr. Robyn Murphy, ND that 99.5% of all molecules in the body are water. One molecule of a toxin (nicotine, stress hormone, GMO foods, etc.) will lock up 1000 molecules of water in our cell. That cell will begin to die or mutate, then it stops functioning. Once 20-30% of an organ's cellular function is down, you start seeing disease. The degeneration of intracellular fluids is the basis of all diseases. Check out the section on Gentle detoxification for some suggestions on how to help your body move toxins out.
As unlikely as this recommendation might sound, investigate the potential for mold growth in your home. This doesn’t have to conjure up visions of delapitated buildings falling apart at the seams. Mold is insidious and can be hidden quite well in perfectly well-kept, beautiful homes! Mold is most common behind walls, around windows, skylights, cabinets, dishwashers, shower stalls, beneath or around toilets and in basements or crawlspaces.
An active leak is not always visible. We lived in a home for 8 years before finding multiple leaks that had been going on possibly since the house was built, two owners before us! It took unusual circumstances for those leaks to become evident and the one that created the most damage wasn’t discovered until we began to tear away our stone facade across the front of our home. We were actually attempting a very minor repair when we discovered that many feet of subfloor was rotted through across almost the whole front of our home, to the point that you could reach in from the exposed front of the house and grab crumbling wood! We live in a beautiful home, and at the time it was only 13 years old, it has always been well maintained and updated. This rotted wood wasn’t visible from the unfinished basement or the living space! So please don’t write this off yet. Mold can be anywhere and many homes are inflicted.
One major consideration is how each inhabitant tolerates it. About 25% of the population has a genetic mutation that prevents their body from eliminating mold toxins which are neurotoxic to the body, especially when they accumulate. Some situations are clearly worse than others, once you can see mold which is microscopic, you have a situation on your hands, but don’t think for one second that just because you have a new home or you don’t see leaks, that you are in the clear. If you or someone in your home is experiencing symptoms, especially anxiety or angry outbursts, make the time to learn more and investigate. The more I research and speak with families who have been through it, the more I realize that PANS/PANDAS is often caused by mold toxicity, even when strep is a known factor.Concurrently with the above tasks, you can slowly and systematically begin reducing toxins in the home environment. This will take time, so don’t get overwhelmed by all the things you should be replacing or doing. Just bite off what you can chew, don’t take on more than you can manage emotionally and financially. You’ll get there. Our journey is still in progress and we’ve been at it for over a decade. Some items are inexpensive and can easily be replaced as you run out of things, or when something needs to be replaced, but others will require more of an investment in time and money. So sometimes planning ahead is necessary, but even small changes can add to the accumulator effect of reducing toxins. Don’t expect a miracle after just changing your shampoo, 😊 progress may take longer to witness when a larger portion of the toxins have been reduced, but know that you are doing the right thing by making even the small changes which will add up over time.
Find a naturopathic doctor who can conduct testing from specialized labs. There are so many great labs that conventional doctors don’t utilize, because they just aren’t trained in areas outside of pharmaceuticals. Insurance has a way of deterring the use of some of the best labs on the planet. Having a partner in the task of identifying causes and contributors to the health condition you are experiencing can be pivotal in your quest for recovery. This process may identify nutritional deficiencies that can be easily managed with supplements, or more food sensitivities that must be managed, it may uncover pathogenic overgrowth of a microbe or parasite, or maybe the thyroid has been struggling and although testing doesn’t result in “out of range” numbers, it does reflect subclinical hypothyroidism. This and many other factors can be narrowed down with a naturopath. Once you know what you are dealing with, you can move forward with an individually tailored plan that intuitively feels right for you. It may or may not involve this same naturopath for instance. We went on to use dietary interventions, natural detoxification techniques, homeopathy, energy medicine and high doses of probiotics all while continuing to decrease toxins in our environment.