Depression, Anxiety and Fascia: What One Self‑Myofascial Release Session Changed | Jason Van Blerk | Be Well Moments

0:00Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10So one paper that I want to talk about was a randomised controlled trial, so it was a very good scientific paper, where they found that people with depression had stiffer, less elastic fascia, especially in the neck and upper back. and in just one session of self myofascial release if I said that correctly reduced their negative memory bias and improved their mood that blew my mind that's one of the papers that you sent me um I think that was I mean it's still a small sample size I think it was around 67 people they had in each set but still you know still an RCT it's still something definitely not be dismissed I found that really interesting that obviously we're talking about emotion depression anxiety is hugely on the rise and we can sometimes think about it just as in our minds.

1:00It's just kind of lodged in this kind of upper part of us, but we forget that it can be so connected to our bodies. And, you know, I am a big fan of Dr. Gabo Matti's work and he talks a lot about, you know, back pain is connected to emotion. So this is why I find this so fascinating. So if people are suffering with, you know, stress, poor mood, depression, how should they be thinking about daily movement in relation to their fascia? If the body's not able to move, it stagnates. And we're not able to produce the feel-good hormones anymore. And one of the other things is like, if I squeeze your ribcage really tight, if I squeeze it, you're going to start getting anxious because your body feels threatened.

1:45I'm threatening your ability to breathe. Well, what are bras doing? Squeezing the ribcage slightly, which drives a stress response. And so if we can reduce the tension on the body, then the body starts to calm down. If the body calms down, the brain calms down. Because if I'm in stress, my body will take all of its resources, all of its energy to try and solve the problem. But if we can just give the body more space, reduce the tension, reduce the stress, then all of a sudden the thoughts calm down. Like when people do this practice, they say, I don't have any thoughts like they go complete it completely empties their mind and it's because if the body's in stress it drives thoughts we're trying to solve depression through the brain it doesn't work that way it's not a chemical issue it's an issue with the body the body's not able to flow we're blocking the body's ability to perform and if we can get the body moving it will start to heal and then our thoughts calm down stress calms down anxiety calms down yeah I think somatic work has been massive for my own kind of self-experience.

2:55This is obviously completely anecdotal. But for me, when I felt the most disconnected to my body, it's not talking therapy that helps me. It's not journaling my thoughts down. It's actually a connection back to my body and my emotions, I guess, because I think we can all live in a world where we're very disconnected from that. We're kind of drawn away from our body. And also, I do think if we We can have a flux of emotions in our body. I mean, we quite like the happiness ones and the excited ones, but they're also very related to fear. The excitement emotion is also very related to the fear emotion.

3:29It's very similar chemicals. Really similar chemicals, but I don't think we're taught to, I guess, feel comfortable with them. Well, look, I was a guy growing up in the world as an athlete. Everything I've been taught is to suppress emotions. So for me, it was like anger, maybe a little bit of happiness with my friends. but I didn't really have the different flavors of emotions. It took me a long time to become emotionally aware. And what I realized when it comes to really helping the human body is there's three paths. One is talking, which we just talked about. The other one is the emotions and the other one is the body.

4:08Or talking or thoughts, let's put it that way. And when we're helping somebody, I work with a lot of people and they say, I've tried everything. I've done talk therapy, whatever. It's because their body's not moving. So we get the body moving, all of a sudden the emotions and the mind change as a result. So if we want to access and help the body or help somebody transform their life, you have to hit all three. You can't just hit one. When you work on the body, the emotions come up. When the emotions come up, now you can change your narrative, your thoughts, or your story about it. You have to hit all three levels.

4:40Otherwise, you're not completing the loop. so people will do emotion therapy but they're not changing the way that they see the situation they're not moving their body so it's incomplete you have to hit all three in order to really help somebody so for people who are like okay so it's rotation it's movement i mean i know you gave us one exercise already in the pre-interview but to give people an understanding of these rotations can you just give us some examples you want to do one yeah can i do it i mean for anyone who's watching this i literally have hills and a black long skirt on can i do it like this yeah absolutely is this the most is this the most interesting dress sense that someone's come to you in you know it's it's funny because you can really do this anywhere at any time wherever you are for anyone yes okay great i sometimes do it when i'm in the middle of a meeting nobody even knows i'm doing it i can do it right now on this podcast and nobody would even know that i was doing it and there's different movements based on different scenarios so let's do an easy one so if you take your left hand and place it on your trap.

5:42And your right hand, just grab your elbow. And you're going to twist the elbow outwards. And normally you would bring it above your head, but just keep it here for a moment and twist as much as you can out and lock it in place and just hold it there. And we're going to hold this for about a minute. What we're doing here is we're taking the bone and we're torquing the bone outwards. As you do that, it creates almost like a vortex or torsion pattern in the fascia that we saw there and it starts to unwind the tension deep around the bone all the way into the shoulder joint so somebody's dealing with shoulder pain if they do something like this while they're sitting in a meeting while they're sitting in traffic while they're waiting for something you do this for a minute it will unwind the tension thanks so much for listening to hear the full episode there's a link in the description

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