Setting Yourself Free With Your Nervous System

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

0:32Darin Olien:By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since I've started this ad. You don't think of these small little things, but they add up a lot over time, and we can do something about it. That ends up to be over a billion plastic toothpaste tubes a year alone. that ultimately end up in our environment and in our waterways and ultimately ends up in the ocean. Do you want to add to this or do you want to do something different? Plus, maybe that exposure to that plastic, getting the plasticizers and the endocrine disruptors and then putting that toothpaste in your mouth also is not a good idea.

1:21Darin Olien:There's some great solutions. You can DIY stuff. I've got many of these in my fatal conveniences, but the easy ones that I use every day, and I'm about to travel a lot more, and the traveling makes them really easy, I go to bite. I bite down on a little tablet, which is not interacting with any plastics because it's in a glass bottle. And it's refillable and reusable and sustainable. And there's no unwanted toxic fluorides, flow agents, and solvents in my mouth. So my favorite is this Bite Toothpaste. 100 % home, compostable pouches, subscription models. You don't even have to think about it again.

2:07Darin Olien:You're helping you by putting clean products in your mouth, and you're helping the environment because Bite Toothpaste is one of the best companies I've seen looking at all aspects of their supply chain and their refillable, reusable, sustainable, regenerative practices. So Bite is offering you, all my listeners, 20 % off your first order. Go to trybite.com, T-R-Y-B-I-T-E forward slash Darren20 or just use the promo code Darren20, D-A-R-I-N, and you can get 20 % off your first order with a great new toothpaste without using the tube. Hey, everybody. I want you to think about the last time you reacted to something.

2:53Not responded, but reacted. We all do that. when something happened and before you even had the time to think about it, a feeling rose up in what you were feeling and it felt way bigger than the moment deserved. This one happened to me, a very good friend of mine who was accusing me of a bunch of things that I knew wasn't completely mine. And I wanted to react. The emotions showed up. But I had some space, which I'm going to get into, that created more space so I didn't just react. And maybe if it was someone's tone or a look from a partner being overlooked, being criticized, and even if it was gently criticized, maybe it was feeling left out, being told no.

3:50And the reaction that came could have shown up as a shutdown, getting cold, could have been rage, could have been some people-pleasing, overcorrection, could have been withdrawal, and also a need to fix immediately. You're like, oh my God, this doesn't feel good, so I need to fix it. All of that stuff. And it almost feels like it came from somewhere else. And it did. A younger version of you. Let me explain. Something that changed everything for me is recently I've dove into this really started in 2025 when I was in a lot of physical pain. My tolerance for life was really low. So in that, I felt reactive.

4:36I felt less in control. And I started diving into this birth, after birth, like after my birth, into my childhood, what was going around my home. Really the ages, and the research backs this up, between zero and eight. And this is also what we're going to explore today. This was when your body and your brain were operating in a completely different state than it does now. And we'll let you know about what this is. One of those things is back then, you were in a theta and delta brainwave state primarily. The same states as hypnosis and deep meditation. Your critical mind, the filter that evaluates information, wasn't really there before accepting things.

5:31So a lot of it you just received. And this part of your brain had not developed the discernment. Which means everything that happened to you in those years went in, went into you without a filter. every interaction, every spoken word to you, about you, around you, every moment you felt unsafe, unloved, not enough, was too much. Maybe you felt you were too much. Maybe you felt invisible. Every pattern you watched in the adults around you, you soaked in. How they handled their anger, grief love money conflict go down the list it got downloaded directly without any slowing down directly into your nervous system as a program not as a memory per se but certainly shows up you can look up the question not as a memory can look up like as the question as a biological operating system as the automatic default response now that is running your adult life.

6:44And here's what I need you to hear. Most of us are walking around in a 30, 40, 50, 60, 70-year-old body running from a five or six-year-old operating system running with a five or six-year-old operating system, a software system, and we don't even know it. We think we have control. Today's episode is one I wish I had 20, 30 years ago, and maybe in some respects I did, actually. I did a bunch of work on myself, but now I've forgotten it, and I'll tell you why I forgot it. But now I'm grateful because I've got a hold of some of the stuff that I didn't before recently. So we're going to talk about what actually happened inside our developing brains, our nervous system in those years, and why it still controls us today in ways that we haven't fully connected yet.

7:43And most importantly, there are specific science-backed practices that can help you see it, feel it, release it, and finally rewrite it so that you can potentially and perhaps have more out of life instead of this automatic programming. I'm Darren O 'Lean. This is Super Life. And today I'm committed to you, like every day, for you having a super life. But let's get into the root of all of this stuff. The brain window that changes everything. So getting into a little neuroscience, because until you understand what has happened in your brain in those early years, it's hard to understand because it's kind of like you can't put your finger on it.

8:34Once you understand the biology, you have a little more wiggle room as to, hey, maybe I can do something about it. Maybe I should do something about it. Maybe I have the ability to change who I think I am, which you do. Because once we have this, we can do something about it. Once we become aware, we can then choose differently. Between birth and approximately eight years old, the brain undergoes its most rapid, radical development of our entire lifetime. Trillions of synaptic connections are being form, trillions, trillions. The architecture of your stress response system, your hypopituitary adrenal axis, the HPA axis, your amygdala fear network, your prefrontal cortex, all of these things is being built and calibrated in real time between zero and eight.

9:36And the primary calibration signal is your what? Your environment. What's going on? Specifically, is the world safe around you or is it dangerous? Are the people around you reliable or unpredictable? Am I worthy of love or do I have to earn it? Do I matter or do I feel invisible? These answers to many, and also many, many, many other things, this answers your nervous system. The answers to these questions develop your nervous system, gathering this evidence based on what actually happened to you specifically. Not what was intended, but what actually happened. The baseline that your entire adult stress response has been operating from ever since, unless you've done some work.

10:29So at University of California, Irvine, in the frontiers of behavioral science in 2019, Early life experiences program specific stress-sensitive neurons and circuits during critical developmental windows. Adverse experiences during these windows produce persistent elevations of stress hormones and lasting alterations in the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. the exact brain regions governing fear, memory, emotional regulation, critical. These changes are not simply psychological. They are structural and neurochemical. There is also one of the biggest and potentially most important research protocols, studies that you've never heard of.

11:21In the late 1980s, a physician named Dr. Vincent Folletti at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego was running an obesity program. And here's where it's interesting. You notice something confusing. Patients who were actually, this is crazy now, incredible. Patients who were losing weight rapidly were dropping out of the program when that was the point of the program. Not because they failed, but because as the weight came off, they seemed to get worse emotionally. He started asking his patients about their histories, and what he discovered changed the entire field of medicine as it looked at this. He partnered with Dr.

12:08Robert Ananda at the CDC, and together they conducted what became known as the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, the ACE Study. They surveyed 17 ,421 adults about 10 categories of childhood adversity, from physical, emotional, sexual abuse, to neglect, and household dysfunction, things like parental mental illness, domestic violence, incarceration, or substance abuse. A lot. Then they looked at what happened to those people's health as adults. The results were so alarming that Folletti said later, quote, we have been looking for the answer to the health crisis of America and we found it. It's in the years of childhood.

13:05Let that sink in. 64 % of adults in the original ACE study reported at least one adverse childhood experience. One in eight reported four or more of these adverse experiences in childhood, and the data showed a dose-response relationship. The more ACEs, the higher risk, the more adverse events that happened in this 0-8 area of their childhood, the higher risk of virtually every major disease. Wow. Four or more of these adverse events, 12 times more likely to attempt suicide, seven times more likely to be an alcoholic, dramatically elevated risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lung disease, liver disease, depression, autoimmune conditions.

14:03Children exposed to four or more were nearly three times more likely lead to experience major depression by early 30s. $748 billion, the estimated annual economic burden of health conditions associated with these ACEs in adults. This is not a psychological issue sitting in a therapy office. This is the single largest driver of chronic disease in the Western world. This was reported by the CDC in 2023. Have you heard about all of this before? I know. And the mechanism, the biology, the biological connection of the early childhood experience to adult is equal to disease the more it plays out. It runs through one critical pathway, The chronic sustained activation of stress response that was started from zero to eight and is continuing.

15:07The nervous system that got programmed in fear, unpredictability, or emotional scarcity stays in the survival mode for decades. That survival mode produces chronic inflammation, immune dysregulation, hormonal disruption, and the behavioral patterns, the numbing and the overworking, the attachment struggles, the self-sabotage that look from the outside like the personal failings, but are at the root a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do. It needed to do that at the time. And there's an opportunity to change it because you're not under those same stresses and events. Your patterns are not weaknesses.

15:59These are patterns. These are not you. They are not character flaws. They are not just who you are. They are survival adaptations. Brilliant, creative responses at that time developed by that child. You, who needed to navigate an environment they had no power to change, whether the hypervigilance, the people-pleasing, the emotional shutdown, the rage, the anger, the fear, the inability to receive love. every single one of those and more. All of those patterns kept you safe in a world where you were small and had no choices at that time. Your nervous system did exactly what it was designed to do.

16:52It worked then. It works now. That nervous system is now costing you something else, and it can be changed.

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18:45Darin Olien:That's M-A-N-N-A vitality.com. Use the code DAREN20 and you get 20 % off your order. This isn't about health. It's about living in harmony with your greatest and highest potential. Research in epigenetics, the study of how environment alters gene expression without changing the DNA itself, just the expression, has revealed that trauma leaves chemical marks on specific genes that regulate the stress response. And some of these marks can be inherited. even the trauma of a family member. Research gets crazy around this NR3C1, this glucocoracoid receptor gene that governs how your cells respond to cortisol.

19:36Shows that childhood adversity methylates these genes in ways that makes the stress response hyperactive for life. And these genes show similar patterns. It just keeps expressing, expressing, expressing. And research followed the children and the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, famine survivors, and other populations that experience extreme collective trauma have found measurable epigenetic changes in stress response genes across generations. This doesn't mean that you are a victim to your circumstances because we're going to tell you. There's things that you can do, things that you can change.

20:18You may be 40 years old, 50, 60, whatever, but your nervous system is responding from your age of 4 or 5 or 6 until you know that. Really know it in your body, not just your mind. You will keep wondering why you can't just get over something. You were never supposed to get over something. You were supposed to heal from it. Therein lies the biggest part of this podcast today. And the patterns you thought were just you are not you. They're just patterns. Just that alone. That thought alone creates space and it creates choice. Before we can get to healing, I want to spend a moment helping you see where this programming shows up.

21:08It's the person who cannot receive a compliment without deflecting it. Because somewhere before the age of eight, love felt conditional, unsafe. So receiving became dangerous. This isn't all nervous system. It doesn't make sense in your brain. This is not sensical in your brain. This is nervous system stuff. It's also the high achiever who cannot stop. I was that. That was me. Achieve, achieve, achieve, keep going, keep going, because I felt undeserving. I felt less than. Just deeply, deeply programmed in my nervous system. Fighting for my life. keep going, keep going, keep going, because if I don't keep going, I might die.

21:53That was at the nervous system level. It's the high achiever who can't stop, cannot rest, which was me, cannot feel like I was enough because the nervous system was wired for scarcity, emotional neglect, which I got growing up. It wasn't my parents' fault. Hold on. I'll see you guys. All of this stuff, all I was really looking for was love. It's also the person who explodes disproportionately to small triggers because the amygdala calibrated in these high threat environments has a hair trigger alarm that was never reset. It's the person who chronically abandons themselves, their needs, their voice, their boundaries, all of it.

22:36Just gives it away because they may have learned early that taking up space was punished. It's a person who also can't sustain intimacy, can't trust, can't fully let someone in because the people didn't feel safe. And the lesson they got was into these deep, deep layers in their operating system. The body keeps the score. This is not in your head. This is not to sit in a chair and regurgitate stories. This is in your body. Yes, there's trauma therapists that are doing this work now. Trauma doesn't live in the story you tell about your past. It doesn't live there. It lives in your posture, your breath patterns, your starter response.

23:22It lives with you in the world, how you're responding to things, how you're reacting, your digestion, your immune system, your capacity for love and joy. Until it is actually addressed in the body, at the body level, at the nervous system level, talking about it alone will never be enough, ever. Research at Harvard in 2023, childhood trauma is associated with volumetric reductions in the hypnocapnus, the anterior singlet cortex, the corpus colostrum that persists into adulthood, predicting elevated risk of anxiety, depression, interpersonal dysfunction, all of this stuff. There are not abstract findings.

24:08They explain why trauma survivors often feel split, why they struggle to access words for emotions, why regulation feels impossible under stress. The most important thing I want you to take from this episode and this particular section is the brain retains the capacity for radical change, period. The brain and the body throughout your life. neuroplasticity and adaptation is freaking real the patterns installed before the age of eight are deep but they are not you and they are not permanent but they will take you you will take you to show up to change something to investigate them to dive into them which i'll talk about They are not you, and they can be rewritten.

25:01There's five practices. They're all backed by great research and science, and there's a lot of stuff. I went to a workshop. It was not even really a workshop. It was months of practice, and I got rid of decades and decades and decades of pain that I was carrying around from zero to eight. It changed my life. I'm a new person. The reason I'm talking about it is because I'm on the other side. Am I perfect? Nope. but I have more space and I can choose differently, not being run by nervous system stuff. So the somatic experiencing is more and more powerful. There was a book I read 27 years ago by Dr.

25:42Peter Levine called, what was it called? Waking the Tiger, I think. But anyway, his study is somatic experiencing. Here's the thing. What he discovered is how animals discharge stress after threat. This is very fascinating. And they do it through somatic experiencing. And it's based on one core insight. Trauma is not the event that happened. It is the incomplete physiological response that got frozen in the body, in the nervous system when the event was too overwhelming to process at that time. So think a gazelle that escapes a cheetah. Once it finds itself safe and it escapes, it shakes violently for several minutes because in that mammal, if it kept that level of stress in the body of just escaping death, it would die from the overwhelming nervous system.

26:42So it goes, finds a safe place, and it discharges this nervous system event. Humans, unlike animals, typically suppress that discharge. We tighten up. We don't scream into a pillow. We don't discharge this stuff. We tighten up. We hold our breath. We go numb. We just try to go in the do-do-do world, go in my next thing, go in my next thing, and push down all of this stuff. And the survival energy keeps it staying locked in the bodies for years. A 2017 randomized controlled trial published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress found that somatic experiencing, like Dr. Peter Levine was talking about, significantly reduced PTSD.

27:31and people, a 2022 review, European Journal of Psychotrauma confirmed its effectiveness as well. How do you practice? Find a quiet space, place both feet on the ground, feel the weight of your body, slowly scan your body from feet to crown of your head, and notice where there's tension, numbness, held breath. Don't try to fix it. Just feel it. Feel into it. Breathe into it. into that space with presence, gentleness. You may feel some energy. You may feel some trembling or heat or let your body involuntary move if it needs to. Let it discharge, even if it's light, even if it takes a little bit to surrender, follow it, stay present.

28:20Listen, all of this stuff is infinitely better with someone who's regulated next to you. Could be a loved one could be a professional whatever that is is infinite mirrored space having someone with you is also powerful but you can start these things there's another process called emdr eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is also powerful developed in the 1980s this one obviously with a practitioner, internal family systems, meeting the parts, running the show. This was coined by Dr. Richard Schwartz. Internal family systems offers one of the most compassionate maps of the inner world ever created.

29:05The core insight, your psyche is not one unified self. It is systems or parts and sub-personalities. And a lot of these things come out of these triggers and these events and they become managers or inner critics or the overachievers of the people pleasers. They're part of you because they were adapted from the nervous system at the time. The goal of this is not to silence or defeat or overpower one, but to listen to it. Call in a calm, curious, compassionate place. Who are you? What do you want? What is your expression? Into that, lean into it. Powerful. This is a full practice. Find a practitioner.

29:53Expressive writing, which is something I kind of do every day. I kind of. I do do in some form every day. 20 minutes. James Pennybaker, the University of Texas, spent four decades looking at studying this kind of thing. It's remarkable. 15 to 20 minutes of expressive writing without worrying about spelling, worrying about anything, identifying any emotional difficulty, and just write for four consecutive days for 20 minutes. So let that mechanism happen. So basically, it's like this, 20 minutes without stopping. You might get hand cramps, just keep going, hell right with your left hand, whatever, right, left, whatever.

30:38Write down your deepest thoughts about a situation, feelings about something, someone, difficulties in your early life, always that's good, zero to eight, if you can identify anything. Write, write, write, write, write, write, write. Don't worry about grammar or structure and don't stop. And if you stop, start again and do this for four consecutive days. Reparenting is a whole other thing too. This is also powerful and all of these together. So just know you are not broken. You are not the sum of what happened to you. You are the one who gets to decide what happens next. The nervous system that got programmed in fear, in survival, can be reprogrammed in love.

31:25That is not an abstract thing. That is real. and that is actually backed by a lot of data and actual neuroscience. But the deepest healing always happens in the presence of another who is regulated with you. So if you're in a relationship, do this work together. And I'm thinking of maybe doing something around this space at some point with people. So I'm thinking about that. And if you're interested in that, let me know and we'll maybe put a workshop together to dive into some of this stuff professionally. Okay, points to ponder. Think about that. You are not what happened to you. You are how you respond.

32:12Peace, love, super life.