Episode 392: Beyond the Trauma Anchor: How Neuroplasticity Rewires Pain and Anxiety with Dr. David Hanscom

0:00All right, everybody, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Wired for Addiction, and honestly, I am so excited about this partnership. You might remember Dr. Evelyn Higgins from when she came on the show to talk about the biomarkers of addiction. That episode landed in such a powerful way for so many of you, and I really believe in the work she's doing. Here's the thing, if you or someone you love has been caught in chronic relapse, addiction switching, or treatment that only works for a while, the issue may not be behavioral. It may be biological, and that changes everything. Dr. Higgins and her team actually measure the underlying biomarkers driving these patterns, dopamine, cortisol, inflammation, mitochondrial function, and then build a personalized plan to bring your biology back into balance.

0:52She put together a free guide for you, the Biology of Addiction 10 Core Biomarkers, downloaded at theaddictedmind.com forward slash wired. That's theaddictedmind.com forward slash wired. There'll also be a link in the show notes. And I want you to know, you are not broken. Sometimes your biology just needs to be understood, and I think that brings a lot of hope. All right, on to this episode. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Addicted Mind podcast. I'm Dwayne Osterland, and I'm your host.

1:30Okay, so you put your hand over your stove, you take it off. If I hold it there, you get really angry and you fight. The idea is that anger and anxiety are still physiological responses. And it turns out that mental pain is much less tolerated than physical pain. So how does that work? So we medicate people. We try to convince them and counsel them that it's really okay, that you can keep your hand over the stove. That's where addictions come from is our inability to escape our thoughts.

1:59so today's conversation goes deep into what's actually happening in your body when you're stuck in chronic pain anxiety or addiction and why trying to think your way out of it doesn't work my guest today is dr david hanscom a former orthopedic spine surgeon who spent over 30 years performing complex spinal surgeries before walking away from his practice at the peak of his career. And why? Because he realized that most of the chronic pain he was seeing wasn't a structural problem. It was the nervous system stuck on high alert, what he calls threat physiology. And surgery wasn't going to fix it.

2:43What makes David's perspective so compelling is that he's not just talking about this from From a research standpoint, he lived it. He spent 13 years suffering from crippling anxiety, panic attacks, and 17 different physical symptoms, all while operating at the highest level of spine surgery. And what finally healed him wasn't therapy, wasn't medication. It was understanding that his body was stuck in a sustained state of fight or flight and learning how to shift back into safety. In his new book, Calm Your Body, Heal Your Mind, he lays out why repetitive unwanted thoughts are the root of so much of your suffering and why addiction is really the brain's desperate attempt to get your hand off of that metaphorical stove and what it actually takes to build a new nervous system.

3:38I think this episode is really going to change the way you think about pain, anxiety, and recovery. But before we jump in, if this podcast has been meaningful to you, take a moment to rate and review The Addicted Mind on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Even better, write a review. Those reviews help people who are struggling find this show. And follow us on social media so you stay connected. All right, let's get into this episode.

4:11All right, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Addicted Mind. I have Dr. David Hamscoms with me, and we're going to talk about his new book, Calm Your Body, Heal Your Mind. We're going to talk about pain. We're going to talk about all of that stuff. So, David, you want to jump in, just introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into this work, and then we'll just go from there. Yeah, my name is David Hanscom. I'm an orthopedic spine surgeon. I trained in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and my practice was complex spinal deformity. So I was training pediatrics, which has got its own set of challenges.

4:51But what evolved was that I ended up being mostly an adult spinal deformity surgeon. And unfortunately, most of the deformities were created by surgeons who operated on patients who did not need surgery in the first place. So people have an operation on a normal aging spine, degenerative disc disease. They were told it was a source of pain and they'd have a fusion. Then the spine would break down and they would break down again. And so by the time they get to me, many people had five or 10 operations before they got to me. I had a couple of people with over 20 and it's become so routine that they have a name for it called failed back surgery syndrome.

5:28And then what's got worse the last 10 years, and I was in charge of the Scoliosis Research Society. And scoliosis, as you know, is a major spinal deformity. So I was in charge of a non-operative committee. And what's happened in pediatrics, there's very clear indications for deformity. At a certain point, you have to fuse it so it doesn't get worse. Well, they took that idea and took it to pain. And they attributed pain to the scoliosis. They started doing, instead of doing one and two level fusions, that didn't work. They're doing fusions from the neck to the pelvis. High calification rate, it doesn't work.

6:00And so what happens, probably 70 % of spine surgery should not be done, at least. Wow. And so I just saw one yesterday of a girl who's got a 20 degree curvature of her spine, which means nothing. And we'll talk about this whole synthesized nervous system in a second. But when I found out with the Scoliosis Research Society and Operative Committee, that there's no documented evidence anywhere that scoliosis or kyposis causes pain unless it's unbalanced. So there's a massive amount of surgery being done now, huge expense, huge operations, high mortality, high morbidity rate, mortality is there, but you're doing a big operation, really disabling people even more.

6:39So the last five years have become dire. So I saw so much of this in practice. In 2019, I quit my practice in Seattle and I was seeing three to five patients every week badly damaged by spine surgery. Then meanwhile, in 1990, after four years of practice, I developed severe chronic pain myself. I developed 17 different physical and mental symptoms, came out of nowhere. I did not know what happened. Nobody could tell me. So I went on this relentless search to go, what happened? So I had ringing in my ears, migraine headaches, itching scalp, skin rashes, burning feet, stomach issues, back pain. Then it also turns out that anxiety, depression, bipolar, OCD are all inflammatory metabolic disorders.

7:21They're not psychological. That's interesting. So I just learned that since 2020. I work with another group of researchers is that anxiety is just a sensation you feel when you're in fight or flight. So my cat has the same response. Humans have a name for it. We call it anxiety, but it's a description. It's not a diagnosis. I feel anxious. Well, what do you feel? You feel your body's chemistry or your emotions. So in fight or flight, these signals are supposed to be incredibly unpleasant. The way it evolved, the creatures who did not pay attention to these signals just didn't survive. It's a very deep, severe, unpleasant alarm system.

7:57And it's your friend. If we did not have anxiety, how long would we live? Not very long. Not too long. Just crossing the street. You have to be on alert. So every living creature has anxiety. Humans have a name for it. So you have a signal that says danger. Your body reaction is fight or flight. We then solve the problem causing anxiety. But what happens if we can't solve the problem? What do we do? Right. Well, our body kicks in more chemistry, but includes dopamine. So it's fight or flight. So we kick in more chemistry, dopamine, which allows approach behavior. It's also addicting, by the way.

8:30And so we go to anger. So anger is a more intense form of anxiety. They're both chemical reactions. The reason why it's so critical in the mental health world, and that's where I feel like I've been able to make a significant contribution. to this whole process is that I suffered for 13 years with 17 different symptoms. They're now all gone. And I'll explain every one of them. And I'll explain why in a second. But so you have anger, anxiety response to a threat. Your body goes into fight or flight. And when it's sustained, your body breaks down. It's well documented that sustained stress breaks down the body.

9:04It's not acute intermittent stress. It's that sustained stress we can't rest and recover. So for example, when a bodybuilder is weightlifting, if they overtrain, they break the muscle down. So you break the muscle down during weight training, and when you rest in between, why is it going to regenerate? That's why with your heart, your heart has to rest between each beat, which is a miracle, by the way. But it's that rest between exercises that allows you to heal. Anyway, sustained fight or flight, what we call threat physiology, causes severe symptoms, illness, and disease, both mental and physical.

9:37Right. The reason why it's so critical to understand this, and if you remember nothing, if your audience doesn't remember anything about this talk today, is that this thing we call anxiety, the unconscious brain processes about 1 billion bits of information per second, a billion. Guess how much the conscious brain processes? I have no idea, but I don't think it's that much, is it? No, it's 20 to 30. 20 to 30. Wow. So remember, the human consciousness is only about 50 or 60 ,000 years old in light of four and a half billion years of evolution. So right now, our human consciousness is sort of an appendage.

10:12Yeah. So we have a beautiful, massive survival machine. So that's where, quote, psychology doesn't really work anymore because you have this massive physiological response. You have a feeble conscious brain that is no match. Now, what the conscious brain does, which is very powerful, so trying to control anxiety or anger is like trying to stop an 11 ,000-horsepower dragster with bicycle handbrakes. Not going to happen. But what consciousness does, it gives you the steering wheel. So Bruce Lipton is a friend of mine. Do you know Bruce Lipton at all? I don't. He wrote a book called The Biology of Believe, and he's a friend of mine over in Santa Cruz.

10:49and we've collaborated on a few projects together, but he made just a really clear point. We have absolutely no control over anxiety and anger. None. It's a response, right? It's a response to a threat. What are you going to do? If it wasn't an instant response, we wouldn't survive either. So it's incredibly unpleasant. It's incredibly powerful. It's instant. We have zero control. So we're stuck with this in a way, and I know there's a solution here. I know you're getting there, but it can kind of feel like that If you don't know what the solution is, it's like, this thing is taking off. I have this anxiety.

11:23I got to get out. Maybe I'll turn on the dopamine or I'll find something to get out of this chronic state that we're stuck in, which is very unpleasant. Hence addiction. Yeah. Okay. But let's take, let's look at this in a different metaphor, which if you put your hand over a hot stove, what happens to your anxiety? Oh, well, you're going to think about the hot stove, right? And what do you do? You pull your hand away. Right. So what if I grabbed your hand and forced you to hold it over the hot stove? What would be your next emotion? I'm going to fight you or... You'd be angry. I'd be angry. Yeah.

11:57I'd be like, let go of my hand. So remember, anger is that last ditch effort to survive. You're going to get out of the situation no matter what because the consequences are dire. Right. So anxiety in the wild, you avoid the predator, you take hide, you run, whatever you do. And then if you have to, you fight and you either win or you die. So anger is that last ditch effort to survive. Again, this massive survival machine, it works beautifully, and it's a gift. So we have alarms going off all the time. There's always some level of anxiety all the time. And then some things we can't solve, we become angry.

12:30And then if you hold on to the anger, it really breaks your body down. You know, you have supercharged fight or flight. Right. My question here is, how does this go awry? Because you were saying, you know, you were stuck with this. You did all of this work. You saw all this stuff. And then all of a sudden, now you're in your own chronic pain state. You have all of this symptomology. And it was there for like 13 years, right? And you seem like a very smart person, right? Like, what's going on? If I was really smart, I wouldn't have had to suffer for 13 years. Yeah, well, yeah, I know. So that's why I so much passion about this, because some people think things happen for a reason, which I respect that.

13:12I'm not very happy what happened to me. I mean, I spent at least 13 years in a very deep hole while other people were building their practice and doing their thing, which I was doing. I developed, I was at a high level spine fellowship that most people went on to be chairmen of departments, et cetera. I was just trying to stay alive, crippling, crippling anxiety. And I thought it was psychological. I went to 13 years of psychotherapy to solve the problem. Wow. That's a lot. And it got worse. So I think what you should do is work backwards for a second and jump to the end of the story and just put the solutions out there.

13:43So here's what I found out. I've seen hundreds of patients go to pain-free the same way that I did. And the basic principle is that your body breaks down in chronic stress, i.e. fight or flight. Physiological state, remember, emotions, what you feel. So there's a model called dynamic healing that every living creature has to process its circumstances, their environment, their stresses, whatever, their challenges to life. So you have this input of all these sensory input coming into the central system. You have your brain and nervous system and body, which basically are a unit. I do not like the word mind-body anymore because it's just one unit.

14:17They evolve together. And so you have this unit called the body, includes the nervous system with all these sensory receptors. So you have your circumstances coming in, your body is absorbing the sensory input, then it responds with a physiological signal, either a chemical response, well, motor and chemical. In other words, if you take motor action to avoid the predator, but your body chemistry kicks in, your immune system kicks in, your nerve conduction increases. So in stress physiology, your brain transmitters go from calming to excitatory. Your brain itself gets excited. There's inflammatory cells in your brain called microglia.

14:52Your brain itself gets inflamed. Your nerve conduction doubles, so your pain sensitivity goes up. Your blood supply to your gut shuts down, hence irritable bowel. So that's why when you're in sustained fight or flight, there's multiple physical and mental symptoms. So again, I'd ring to my ears. That's a hyperconductive nervous system. That's gone. My feet were burning like crazy for 20 years. That's gone. I had skin rashes popping up over my whole body off and on. Autoimmune disorders. They're also this fight or flight. And so when you start looking at it, the researchers have linked every chronic illness, well, I'd say at least 26, probably all of them to sustain stress or fight or flight physiology.

15:35Right. So when your circumstances overwhelm your coping skills, you're in stress physiology. So your body has two choices, either fight or flight stress physiology or safety. The body breaks down and sustains stress physiology and it heals in safety. That's all you have to know. Right. And people do all these things to help themselves, fix themselves. But the body knows how to heal. As an orthopedic surgeon, if you aren't healing broken bones, I mean, where would we be? Right. I was saying, you can tell me if I'm off base on this. like I remember in some of the research around this was like looking at like spines of people who you know they had pain right and they would say oh look you have a bulging disc that's your pain right right and then they looked at a bunch of other people that had the exact same spine stuff and they didn't have any pain correct and they were like what's what's going on here why is this person have pain and this person doesn't have pain but it sounds like what you're saying is that being in this, how did you say it?

16:34Chronic state of fight or flight. Right. Activation is these things are tied together. Yeah, your whole brain and body short circuits. I mean, people have burning mouth syndrome. They have TMJ, mouth pain, all these different things. And there's a term that's come up for many people that's, I think, incredibly discouraging called MUS, medically unexplained symptoms. Have you heard that term? No, I haven't heard that term. It's a disaster because they're saying, the doctors are saying, well, we know you hurt. Have a good life. We'll help you the best we can. There's nothing we can do. If you look at the physiology of the body, each organism responds in a different way.

17:09There's irritable bowel. There's spastic bladder. There's colitis, Crohn's disease. Even cancer is a stentuous physiology. Alzheimer's, dementia. All these break down the body. So you were saying, kind of going back to the solution here, just to restate this, because I think that's so important. And then we're going to go into like, how does that happen and stuff? And how do we do it? But it's like, we're in this constant state of alert, anxiousness, our body's going there and it doesn't ever get a chance to rest, to heal. Like you were using that example of like lifting weights, you stress it, then you rest and you get better.

17:46But if we're stuck in that state, we're not going to heal. And so the solution is getting us out of that state and into rest and digest. That's what I hear you saying. There's a much, much darker part of the story. Oh, okay. That's why I wrote this book. So I'm helping hundreds of people escape from chronic pain. Their lives improved dramatically, but they still had these repetitive thought patterns. And so one of my symptoms with my, of course, a panic attack is crippling anxiety. That's just a flood of adrenaline and cortisol. So that's, again, a chemical reaction. That is not psychological.

18:18So a panic attack is a physiological response. So that was not great. So that kept going on and on and on. I did more and more talk therapy. The problem is you're doing, it's like talking to your toaster. I mean, there's just so much physiology here and so powerful. There's nothing you can do to actually stop it or solve it. So with humans, your thoughts reflect your physiology. So if you're in fight or flight, why are your thoughts interpreted? So if a dangerous person walked into your room right now, your body physiologically would already have responded instantly. The thoughts come one to 10 seconds later.

18:51So the way we do human consciousness developed is physiology first. and so something dangerous happens you have unpleasant again your brain's interpreting physiology it's unpleasant sensation unpleasant thought they get linked because thoughts have no power what are thoughts they get linked because we react to them i mean why do we not have repetitive pleasant thoughts we're not fighting them yeah that's true that's interesting what happens in physiology is first there's all sorts of things that cause stress in life relationships and money etc. But what happens is that your thoughts start building on themselves, then the thoughts themselves become a threat.

19:29And you might have heard the Eastern religion teaching that we're not worth thoughts. Actually, it's not true. We actually are our thoughts. It's called cognitive fusion. And so what happens, we develop an identity that becomes rigid, becomes as real as a chair or table. And what the brain cannot do, they cannot differentiate the threat from thoughts from a physical threat. It can't tell the difference. It's like, it's like this thought is as much as real as the table over here, even though it may have, it's not, it's just a thought. So how do you escape your thoughts? Cannot do it. So this is a human experience problem.

20:09So everybody has unwanted thoughts. Very few people want to admit to it. I had extreme intrusive thoughts, the worst of the worst. And what led me to commit suicide wasn't the physical pain, it was the repetitive, unpleasant thoughts. And our people say, I don't have unwanted thoughts. I go, well, are you self-critical? You go, oh yeah. Okay, well, is that enjoyable? Are you liking that? We tend to be judgmental of others. We tend to be judgmental of ourselves. And so those are all unwanted thoughts. And if you're looking for peace, love, and joy, again, you're fighting off the self-critical voice.

20:44Sometimes you overachieve. But I want to go to the addiction part really clearly because we're not going to get very much into the solution today. Okay, so you put your hand over your stove, you take it off. If I hold it there, you get really angry and you fight. The idea is that anger and anxiety are still physiological responses. So again, not psychological and not responsive to talk therapy. So what happens is that with mental pain, your hand really is stuck over the stove. And it turns out that mental pain is much less tolerated than physical pain. Right, yeah. Laboratory shows us that this is really clear.

21:17There's a direct link between these repetitive unpleasant thoughts that I call ruts and suicide. And other mammals don't commit suicide that we could do. So for me personally, in 2002, I started to commit suicide, came very close to it. And I would still tell you right this second, if I had to spend the rest of my life in that state of mind with this onslaught of unwanted thoughts, I'd say, fine, I'm out of here. I'm not going to do this. Yeah, no, it makes sense. It's so painful. Right. And when I talk to people now, I can give you some general principles here. But the bottom line is, in mental health, we're actually addressing the thoughts.

21:54Anyway, I'm sorry. So with thoughts, your hands stuck over the stove. So how does that work? So we medicate people. We try to convince them and counsel them that it's really okay, that you can keep your hand over the stove. And mostly addictions, mostly addictive behavior, mostly medications. That's where addictions come from is our inability to escape our thoughts. And then it comes out sideways, right? Like this is all the addiction. It all comes out. Hold your hand. Just keep holding your hand over the stove. You're going to be fine. Right. So I had, just as a background, I was a major spine surgeon in Seattle, and all the people with infected spines from drug addiction would come down to our center.

22:33We were in the center for Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and northern Oregon. So these are really complicated operations. The spine is literally destroyed just like a tumor. The infection just eats up the spine. And so they're horrible operations, really situation. And we do the operations we do six weeks of antibiotics and i would get to know these people for six weeks so what i eventually had to take long to figure this out they're crippled with anxiety guess what heroin and morphine work for anxiety right work yeah it's a painkiller right so it turns out anxiety is the pain and right so okay i'll ask you a rhetorical question okay if anxiety is a physiological state and it's not responsive to cognitive interventions, how do you decrease anxiety?

23:22Well, you have to be able to like calm the body, right? I mean, that's what we're getting to, right? Because if you can't do that, you're just stuck there. You can't outthink it, right? That's what you're saying. You're not going to outthink it. You're not going to outrun it. It's with you. So going back to the handover of the stove analogy, so there is only one answer for that problem is turn down the heat. Yeah. Okay. So there's four parts. We're going to stick with thoughts for a second because we know physical pain is bad. And if I ask people in the clinic, if I could do surgery to get rid of your pain, which I could have by many people, but you live with this anxiety the rest of your life and probably get worse, or you could calm down the anxiety and deal with the physical pain.

24:0590 % of people chose to, they would, I mean, it was still a disorder course, but they couldn't live with the anxiety. You could somehow tolerate the physical pain, but they could not tolerate the relentless anxiety. Remember, it's a very deep, dark, dangerous signal. So the key issue, there's four parts to healing, is that I actually could decrease people's anxiety quite a bit, which is calming tools, directly stimulating the vagus nerve, which decreases the threat response. And I think we're going to go into the details of that today at all. I'm going to have to refer you to the book and that type of stuff, because it gets too confused in here.

24:36The principle is there's four parts to healing from repetitive unwanted thoughts that I call ruts. So you can't control your thoughts, but you can separate from them. So instead of reacting, you train your brain to be less reactive to it. And techniques include expressive writing, write the thoughts on paper, tear it up. Long story behind that, but that's the absolute central starting point. I've never seen anybody get better without it. Mindfulness, you put your brain on a different sensation, cognitive behavioral therapy, you actually reframe the thoughts so they have less impact on you. And there's other things to do, but that's called thought separation.

25:14Right. Not trying to solve them, get rid of them. You're just trying to separate from them. So you're here, the thoughts are here. The second part, which is critical, is calming down the physiology. So if you can calm down the physiology, remember the physiology drives the thoughts. It was happening in medicine where addressing the thoughts, But you get this blast furnace throwing out thoughts, and we're not addressing the blast furnace. So the metaphor I like to use is that of a hornet's nest. The nest represents your nervous system, and the hornets represent your thoughts. And somebody shakes the nest.

25:46What happens to the hornets? They're coming out. They're attacking. So then we start fighting the hornets. How does that work? Yeah, you're swatting out. Or we try to calm them down. Neither one's going to work. So you can't call the hornet, but you can quit shaking the nest. When you do this, you're starting to like kind of come at it from these different angles that is looking at when you say thought separation, it's like pulling your sense of self away from the thought. Would that be accurate to say that? Like the impartial observer, as we talk a lot in mindfulness, like being able to just watch it without being caught in the threat of the thought.

26:30So again, all four parts count. So the reason I'm saying something right now, because people say, I'll just do mindfulness. There's never one solution. It's this whole process that becomes automatic. It's not hard, by the way. Remember, the body heals and safety breaks down in threat. But so the sooner you can get into a curious attitude, playful, what's next, learning, awareness. But what you point out, the third part of healing, which you just referred to, is with the word awareness. You become aware of the thought. You become aware of your reaction to them. You become aware of your physiology, fight or flight or safety.

27:06So most of us go around life reacting and we're not really aware. So the only word you really need to hear today is the word awareness. But the third part of repetitive thought patterns is softening the ego, or as David Byrne says, kill the ego. Because the reason why I have an ego in the first place is because our survival physiology is very unpleasant, and we take it personally. Taking your survival sensations, anxiety, and anger personally is a big problem. Because then we use all these cognitive interventions to make an identity to counteract that. The second thing is we are programmed by negativity, most of us, criticism.

27:42So we create this thing called ego to feel better about ourselves. So these really disgusting reactions or sensations, we create a story about ourselves so we can feel better about ourselves. And we're also competitive, so we want to look as good as we can to other people. And so between all these reasons to create the ego, with repetition, this ego becomes rigid or our identity. So probably one of the more major sources of repetitive thought patterns is defending this thing we call identity. and they're just nuts. So we construct this story about ourselves to figure out a place in the world is competitive.

28:19There's no end point to it. And by the way, ego versus self-esteem is critical because ego is your capacity to defend yourself is dependent on other people's opinions is incredibly fragile. Self-esteem is how you feel about yourself. So self-esteem is great. A powerful ego is sort of a disaster. So to come to the, try to come to a reasonable conclusion right now. So the body breaks down in constant throughout physiology. It's powerful. And so then it heals in safety. So what happens is that you deal with the thought patterns, you deal with the physiology, you soften the ego, but that's just dealing with the anxiety and anger, which is necessary.

29:02In words you develop a working relationship with it you let it do a thing you train yourself not to take it personally by the way most of these thought patterns are distortions they're not real in the first place so with awareness you have this thought distortion and there's nothing you have to do because it isn't real in the first place so i it makes sense yeah so in a way you're by doing that you're once again you're turning down the actual flame right instead of just trying to tolerate or trying to grow calluses on your hand to hold yourself over the fire or something. You're churning down the flame by doing these four things that you talked about.

29:41Let me get to the fourth. Okay. So those three help deal with the stress physiology. You separate from it with awareness. You watch it do its thing. The real healing occurs with neuroplasticity. You construct a new brain. And this brain doesn't have all these crazy circuits. And the Stoics figured this out centuries ago, is that you live a virtuous, good life. That's where your brain develops. If you're complaining, arguing, blaming, where does your brain develop? Right. So what happens with neuroplasticity is that you cannot outrun these circuits. So a hedonistic lifestyle, by the way, is shown to be highly inflammatory.

30:19It doesn't work. But living life with passion, purpose, joy, gratitude, community, spirituality, all these things, take your brain over here. And as you nurture those characteristics, while your brain starts to evolve that direction, once people come out of what I call the abyss of pain, and I think the mental pain is quite a bit worse than the physical, but it is the same thing, by the way. It's all the same thing. So once you learn how to separate from the physiology, some days are just going to be bad days. You're not going to get rid of anxiety or anger, but you don't have to take it personally.

30:53So once you separate, and again, the key word is awareness. That's my stress physiology. But guess what? I'm going this way. As you keep going this way over and over and over again, you develop a new nervous system. And your brain changes by the second. Your brain's already changed this last hour. So is mine. That's how life evolved, is that every living creature had to adapt to its environment like now. So the brain's incredibly neuroplastic. And I would say to jump to the solution here, I am writing the book. It's going to be out in a month, June 2nd, called Calm Your Body, Heal Your Mind. It's called Transcending, Transcend Pain, Anxiety, Anger, and Repetitive Unwanted Thoughts.

31:33But the words transcend, you're not going to fight these things. So you get to put these over here. They're never going away. Then over here, you get to do what you want to do. As you do more of this, at a certain tipping point, you actually cannot go backwards. So instead of inviting that addiction impulse, And addiction include gambling, sex, money, whatever it is. Addiction is addiction. And drugs are more tragic because it's a physical component in addition to it. But if you have unlimited anxiety without any resources, people don't understand why people in addiction do such self-destructive stuff.

32:09But if they don't have an alternative, their hand's still stuck over the stove. And you can't live with your hand over the stove. It's unlivable. Right. So, of course, you can do medications and drugs. And the thing is what happens in medicine, I'll just take an aside here to the addiction world, is that 40 % of my entire surgical practice was with heroin addicts. That's a lot. And I got to know these people really well. And our service never had any trouble with these people as far as behavior problems and demands, et cetera. Whereas the other services, there was arguing, fighting, all sorts of stuff going on.

32:40and what happened is that all of us tend to label other people in medicine people that are on drugs to be addicted not even heroin actually people on drugs need to be labeled as drug seekers and malingers and all sorts of stuff and again labeling is a cognitive distortion so what we did we just got to know these people work with them and we were nice to them and guess what they were nice back so we never had trouble and i and that's where i learned how much anxiety that these people had. And I didn't know about repetitive thought patterns back then. I just didn't understand it. I knew I had my own trouble with it, but I didn't understand the role that they played in really destructive behavior.

33:22And for instance, suicide is not an act of depression. It's an act of anger. Anger is destructive. And the ultimate act of destruction is self-destruction. So these poor people, when they came off their heroin, I mean, they would literally lay there and shake, just quivering with anxiety. I mean, it's obviously the withdrawal issue, but just absolute unrelenting crippling anxiety. And I've been there. I've been there for years. And unrelenting anxiety is just unlivable. It's horrible. So, but again, it's just a physiological state. As you lower the physiology, the anxiety drops. Talking about it, again, from a neuroplasticity standpoint, you're actually reinforcing it.

34:00And I'll say one word about trauma therapy. This is not going to be well-received by your group. You create a trauma story. You create an anchor. Pour me ahead, this, this, and this, this, and this. Who cares? So I'm going to tell you your challenge today, right now, sit back in your chair, call active meditation, drop your shoulders for a second, listen to the sound, and your brain, instead of being erasing thoughts, is simply going to a different sensation. But from this second forward, you can program into your brain anything you want. The past doesn't matter. We know it does it intellectually.

34:33I talked about my trauma for 13 solid years. And you do, so what happens with trauma therapy, develop a tremendous trauma anchor. And all of a sudden, because of the reason for all sorts of things, we're programmed by every second of our life. So if I'm triggered today and such as frustrated, who knows what the exact trigger actually was? It's almost infinite what the possibilities are. So then if you want to create everything around this trauma story, it's probably not actually accurate. And then you actually really double down on it and we call it injury conviction that poor me my mother treated me badly and it's amazing how many adults cannot let that story go cannot let that go so they can't move to this new narrative in a way right but i will say what happens every day in other words this is dynamic healing is what we call it you adjust your circumstances or adjust your input you increase the results of your nervous system you regulate the physiology so there's an input nervous system and output.

35:30And it's that dynamic between your stresses and your coping skills that determines the physiology. Then you get symptoms. We're treating just the symptoms. So when we teach people how to cope with their circumstances better, help them improve their circumstances, improve their coping skills, learn to regulate their physiology, then the symptoms result. Same thing here with addiction. Addiction is a symptom. The question is, why would somebody that's, I mean, we all know tragedies that happen with addiction, but again, your hands took over the stove. Right. And you want to get out. And I can totally understand that if we live in our past and that narrative, we don't have that flexibility to change our brain, change our relationship to how we experience the world in this moment right here and now.

36:20Now, one question that's coming up for me is, how does this go awry in us? Here we are. We have this ability. And you're not preaching to the choir, so to speak, because I totally align with you. And this has been my own experience as well, being able to, I don't know, change that whole relationship and rewire the whole nervous system. And so I can totally relate to that. I totally agree with that. But I'm just wondering, how does it go awry? Why does this go awry? And we don't get to that rest and digest space where we would heal in the first place, right? If that makes sense. Well, this should be taught in grade school.

37:00In other words, that's one of my dreams is to get this taught in the elementary school or earlier because we're not taught the skills. Yeah, yeah. It's a human condition issue that we perceive thoughts, the same as a physical threat, again, cognitive fusion. So we build this thing called ego to protect us, but it turns into a bomb shelter. It becomes very, very rigid. And we know what rigid think. And there's a whole book here in front of me called The Theological Brain. It goes into the neuroscience of mental rigidity. And you get this identity and you get to test your identity and you lose contact with humanity.

37:36Oh, yeah. And this whole different discussion about the blood supply of the brain actually drops down dramatically in anxiety and anger. Because you don't need to think about painting and art when you're running from a tiger. So in humans, when the blood supply shifts, it's a huge shift in thinking. So people can't even access that part of the brain. So we ask, well, why do people fail? First of all, we're programmed mostly by reward versus punishment, right? Good reward, bad, avoid punishment. It's very Pavlovian. So we're programmed mostly by criticism. And so we're constantly seeking rewards, avoiding criticism.

38:09That's how the ego gets developed, et cetera, et cetera. And you said the magical word is that that's the opposite of mental flexibility. So I'm convinced that there's some data coming out now that shows this thing called mental rigidity crosses every mental health diagnosis. Well, the question, what does it do? Well, it turns out that there's another paper that just came up in China that repetitive negative thoughts, they call them RNTs, also cross every mental health diagnosis. They're linked, right? Yeah. And that hasn't been put together in the literature. See what I mean? Yeah, no, totally.

38:44That makes a lot of sense. I think our inability to escape our thoughts drives every chronic illness, mental and physical. It also creates a lot of human evil trying to deal with it. Yeah. The antidote, the anxiety is control. You try to control yourself. You try to control people around you. I mean, I get a little bit crazier because I think just the evil done throughout the history of the world. Most people that are in dungeons and persecuted and executed are just good people trying to do their job. Right. So I just really did. with somebody who has to, for their own survival from the flame, so to speak, they now have to try and control themselves, control the world around them to get out of those, whatever these thoughts they don't want to have, but they're not even conscious that that's actually playing out.

39:34There's not a separation or an awareness, and then they're playing it out on others and causing a tremendous amount of pain in the world. And I think we can see that in our in our world right now. So that's why I'm excited about the book. I'm trying to get a simple, not simple, a basic message out that you're looking at the root of human suffering. And this has taken me 35 years to get to this spot. And I still have a long ways to go. I'm just talking about human consciousness and physiology. I had no idea two years ago that the physiology came first, but that's been known for 150 years. It was documented decades ago.

40:08So I'm excited about the book. I started a study group, inadvertently informal scientific study group in 2020 with Dr. Stephen Porges and a few friends. So we have these geniuses all over the world. And I'm not the genius, but I listen to geniuses. I do the best. I listen to these people. My wife would argue about whether I listen or not, but in general, these people are so smart, but what's happened, each is doing their part of the research, but it's not coming together in one spot. So the book, probably 9 % of this book comes from the collective knowledge of this group. And so I'm excited about it.

40:43This is my fourth book I've written. Random House just totally kicked me around hard to get this thing written clearly. So it's a much better book than I've ever written. And people are responding to it. I'm excited about it. Yeah, I am excited, David. I mean, you know, doing the work that I do, working in the mental health field, I am aligned with your message and it brings so much hope to people because this is really doable. It's not real in a way. I mean, it sounds complex, but it's really not that complex to put into practice and to bring forth. You just need a little bit of information around it, understand it, and then you move forward with it.

41:29And there's something on the other side of this pain if you do this. And that's my own personal experience of working through this and working through chronic pain and doing some of this kind of work. It's just like, yeah, I totally get with you wanting to share that message because it's there. It's there. I mean, I quit my surgical practice at the peak of my career to do this. I just cannot stand people undergoing not only unnecessary spine surgery. You know, spine surgery was done and there wasn't a downside to go fine. But people's lives are absolutely, completely destroyed, devastated. After five operations, your life is spine surgery.

42:07And the pain gets worse after each operation. That's what the data says. So I was watching so many people badly damaged. I'm watching so many people get better with self-directed. You don't need a psychologist to do this. Psychologists help. I mean, they help the process along dramatically. And so like, for instance, if I was working with you, there's a course they have called the DOC Journey that your patients should do maybe five to 10 minutes a day. I'm sorry, 10 to 20 minutes a day. That's it. It allows you to do your job better because all this foundational stuff we talked about today is covered.

42:38So it came out of my busy practice because I was a busy spine surgeon. I didn't have time to counsel my patients. I still see a new patient, half hour, still 15-minute follow-ups. But I gave the homework to them. So here's your homework. And when they come in, I would coach them and give them guidance here and there. But it's a very, very self-directed process. And it's not very hard. It's not. Once you have just this understanding and this information. So great. I'm so excited for your book. It's awesome that you're getting this message out there because it's so fundamental to this healing and can alleviate so much suffering for so many people.

43:15So I know we're getting at our time here. So I love to ask every guest at the end of my podcast, just one question. someone out there is suffering in some way in this, and you could tell them one thing, what would that one thing be? What would you want them to know in this moment? That is completely solvable. This is a solvable problem. This is a solvable problem. I love that. That is so helpful. So, all right, David, how can they find you? Where do they go? Where can they find the book? So I'm assuming you'll post on the show notes, but my website that is everything, It's called backincontrol.com, B-A-C-I-N, control.com, one word.

43:57And then I have a course called the dlcjourney.com, which is the guided course. And the course takes you through a sequence that's really critical. The sequence in it is critical. So you just layer, layer, layer, layer. And again, about 10 to 20 minutes a day, over three to six months, things start to change. Once you change, I get frustrated because people are a lot better and they quit. And once you come out of the hole, you've actually just started. Yeah, yeah. Right? But anyway, over three, six months, changes occur, sometimes faster, sometimes a lot later. I talked to one woman I worked with who's a surgeon.

44:29So I struggled with her in 2018, 19 for a year. And I just gave up. Not going to happen. I just talked to her yesterday, and she's doing just great. So the brain keeps changing. So you never know when things are going to occur. So the key issue is persistence, not patience. Of course, you want to be out of pain. And so, again, the course outlines that. I'm developing a navigator through all the courses to come through it more quickly. I do coach twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon, just in a group setting, which has been helpful. And then the main thing I like to work is with people like yourself, that with your practice, it's a foundation to what you do.

45:10It just allows you to do your job much more easily. So that's how it evolved. That's how I like to actually get it out there. Thank you, David. I'll put all the links in the show notes at theaddictivemind.com so people can check that out. David, thank you so much for coming on and giving your time and doing this important work. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

45:37Wow, that was such a rich conversation. I love the way David frames this, that anxiety isn't a psychological problem. It's a physiological state. And that addiction isn't a moral failure. It's your nervous system trying to get relief from a stove you can't pull your hand away from. That image really stays with you. And what gives me so much hope about his message is that this is solvable. Not easy, but solvable through separation, calming the physiology, softening the ego, and building new neural pathways through how you actually live your life. That's the path. It's not about fighting the thoughts.

46:18It's about building something new alongside them until your brain tips in a different direction entirely. And if you want to learn more, you can check out David Hanscom's book, Calm Your Body, Heal Your Mind, his website, backandcontrol.com. And I'll have all the links in the show notes at theaddictedmind.com. So check it out there. And if this episode shifted something for you, do me a favor, rate and review The Addicted mind wherever you're listening. Write a review if you can. Share this episode with someone who needs to hear it and follow us on social media. Every review, every share helps someone out there find a conversation that might just be the beginning of something different.

47:00So thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. And I'll talk to you on the next episode.

47:12Thank you.