ELIZABETH STANLEY: The Biology of Resilience

0:00We are built so that we learn the down regulation through the soothing we receive from our parents and other early caregivers. And that presumes that our early caregivers and parents were regulated enough to do that for us. Hi, I'm Michael Hyatt. And I'm Megan Hyatt-Miller. And you're listening to The Double Wind Show. And today, I'm flying solo. Megan is usually with me. She's my oldest daughter. But today, she's with one of her daughters at a special event. And I can't wait to introduce you to this week's guest, Dr. Elizabeth Stanley. And I'll tell you my personal story about it in a minute, but Elizabeth is professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

0:44She's a U.S. Army veteran, former military intelligence officer. She's developed a program called MFFT. She'll tell you about it in the program. But it's basically a resilience program that's been taught to thousands of people in high-stress environments. First responders, military personnel, and yes, executives. So she holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT. Her book, Widen the Window, which is where I first became aware of her, blends science, personal narrative, and practical tools. She's also certified in somatic experience therapy, which we've talked about on the show before. But I got introduced to her when my daughter, Mary, interviewed her on her podcast, Fully Alive.

1:30And Mary said to me, she said, Dad, I think this would help you. and I think you'd enjoy it. I listened to it and boy, did it resonate. I promptly went out and bought her book, Widen the Window, which I highly recommend, but I resonate all through that. It's what ultimately led me to confront and deal with my own chronic anxiety and to get into somatic experience therapy where I've made huge progress over the last two years. I'm not fully where I want to be, but I'm a long way down the road. And I just thank God that I had the opportunity to hear from Liz. And I know you'll feel the same. So here's our interview.

2:14Liz, welcome to the show. Michael, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here with you today. We're going to have a good time. I'm so excited to get the backstory here. You tell it in the book, but in the forward to your book, Bessel van der Kolk, who's the author of Body Keeps the Score, he said that based on a friend's comment that all research is me-search. Yes. Which means that we tend to research the issues that we have problems with ourselves. So how does your personal story intersect with this topic? It absolutely does. I definitely think of myself as exhibit A of a mind-body system experiencing a whole wide range of stressful and traumatic events and then having the effects of that happen.

2:58and then experimenting with different ways of beginning to recover from that and eventually developing resilience training from that. So that, in a very short nutshell, was my journey. But I grew up in a military family, ninth generation in the U.S. Army. It was a violent household occasionally, but alcoholic. And I experienced a lot of childhood adversity and sexual violence in childhood and early adulthood. And then I went into the army. I had an ROTC scholarship and I served overseas in Korea and Germany and two deployments in the Balkans, stressful military training. I was having physical symptoms already by then, but was chalking it up to crazy hours.

3:42And when we were in Bosnia, I needed to be resuscitated. I flatlined and needed to be resuscitated. And that was a big shock on the body. And then I was dealing with sexual harassment in my chain of command and reprisal after I reported it. So I left active duty, got to graduate school. And at this point, I have two and a half decades of chronic activation where I was never really recovering. And I had coped with that the way most people who are high achieving in our culture cope with that, like many of your listeners, I'm sure, compartmentalizing it, kind of pushing it to the side and keep going.

4:19In the army, we called that suck it up and drive on. And then it just got to the point where it was debilitating while I was in graduate school. And I started first with talk therapy, which is kind of the go-to in our culture still, didn't really move the needle. And then I was started experimenting with yoga and other mind-body techniques. I found mindfulness, but in many cases, practicing mindfulness made it worse and no one could explain to me why. And that made me really curious. So someone eventually suggested some of the body-based techniques and I did body-based trauma therapy, somatic experiencing.

4:57I eventually got certified as a practitioner myself, did the clinical training. And through all of that, I was really curious to understand what is it about my mind and body that's having a different response from what the therapist says should happen or the meditation teacher says should happen. And so I got really curious about the science, the neurobiology of how minds and bodies go through stress and trauma and how they're resilient. And it led into this process of developing my resilience training program, partnered with neuroscientists and stress researchers. We tested it in military settings with combat troops before they went to Iraq and Afghanistan.

5:36All that published research is on my website. And then I started sharing it in lots of other high stress settings, including in corporate settings. And the one thing that really sort of is my takeaway from at this point, more than 20 years of this arc of this like recovery, and then sharing it with others, just seeing how much we as a culture collectively don't yet understand how much the mind and body has its own lawful way of working, and how much our minds then take things personally or begin to identify with things in ways that really are just the mind and body doing its conditioning. And so for me, learning all that science was hugely liberating.

6:23It made me not take it all so personally. And it also helped me understand the leverage points for the little things we can do differently that really can open up a very different way of moving through the world. And that's what I share in the resilience course, mindfulness-based mind fitness training. And it's what I share in my book, Widen the Window. Fantastic. You know, I think when I started to recognize as a result of your work that I had suffered from chronic anxiety that I hadn't dealt with for decades, I thought I was all alone. And what I discovered, and I wondered if you had the same experience, I thought, you know, I can't really talk about this because, you know, it's a defect.

7:05I mean, this is a weakness. But then I finally, for whatever reason, I decided to share it with a mastermind that I lead. And I mean, people were in tears. People were coming up to me afterwards and saying, I thought I was the only one. You know, one guy was telling me, I can't even sleep at night unless I take at least two trazodone, you know, 200 milligrams. And, you know, other people just say, man, I just, I was close to suicide. Just real struggles from real ordinary people, successful entrepreneurs that when you look at them, you think they've got it all figured out. But did you discover that many, many people, maybe most people struggle with this?

7:43Absolutely. I think it's because our culture tends to really have tendencies to disown aspects of our experience. We romanticize stress, being stressed out or having too much to do and not taking vacation, all of those things are sort of coded as someone's being successful without really owning all the things that go alongside it. And so the other things aren't really being discussed. And all we see is each other's public persona that's looking so, you know, successful and put together. In my life, I felt like I was living a total double life. On the one hand, I was, you know, doing two degrees at the same time and moving towards a a 10-year job at Georgetown.

8:28And by anyone's kind of external sense of successful, I was moving in that direction. But inside my body, I was struggling all the time. I had the worst insomnia. I would have these massive crying jags at home. It was like worse than imposter syndrome. It was just this constant, when is the other shoe going to fall? I was just always sort of in this very, something bad is about to happen. And I didn't discuss it with anyone. I felt like everyone else has it all together. This must just be me. And the thing that has just shocked me, and the reason why I include so much of my story in the book, because that had not been my plan originally to share as much of my story.

9:11But to realize every time I teach, it could be a 30 minute webinar. It could be a longer thing. Afterwards, inevitably, there are always at least a handful of people who come up right after to then share their story. And then over the next, you know, number of weeks, I get these really long emails where people share how hard it is to be human on the planet today. And the constant refrain that you shared there, Michael, I thought it was only me. I didn't think this was going on with anyone else. And we're all in it together. And we're all experiencing the particular lawful ways that this human mind and body works in this particular poly crisis world.

9:57Of course, people are struggling. And it's kind of why it's my passion to help people understand you're not alone in this. There are actually very concrete leverage points we have. And it's lawful. The conditioning we have, we built up over the course of our life. We built it up unconsciously and it's running its programming. We can interrupt it and it's lawful. We have choices with it. And that's what I really want to make sure your listeners are going to get. I think one big takeaway here, for those of you listening, is that if you're despairing that there's no help for your condition, there absolutely is.

10:34And it's science-based, it's clinically researched and it just flat out works. And it's really helped me over the last two years. You know, I wouldn't say I'm completely anxiety free. I'm not sure that you'll ever get completely anxiety free. It's cool to manage it now like I never did before, which brings me to two questions here. One is, what would be some of the symptoms that maybe you have a problem with nervous system dysregulation? Let's call it that because it could show up as anxiety or depression or PTSD or something else? Yes. It can show up in a lot of different ways because the way that the stress arousal system and immune system and our hormone system, our endocrine system, they're all interrelated.

11:17And when one of them gets dysregulated, they all do. And so it can show up in so many different ways. And that's why so many people don't make the connection, oh, this is dysregulation in my mind and body. And there's a core thing I can do that handles all of it. But some of the ways it shows up, well, cognitively, it might show up as trouble remembering appointments, forgetting where you left the keys, trying to concentrate, not being able to concentrate, feeling really distracted all the time, feeling really kind of fuzzy in your head all the time, having constant kind of anxious racing thoughts or looping thoughts where it's just the same thought patterns come back over and over, or catastrophizing where you're like always imagining the worst case scenario and always in that planning to do list.

12:03All of those are ways that can show up cognitively. Physiologically, it can show up as upset stomach, constipation, GERD, just kind of weight gain or lack of appetite. It can show up as chronic pain. It's effortful to do that suppression and it shows up as chronic muscle tension that becomes kind of a tightening in the body that eventually can become chronic pain patterns. It can show up in our habits to try and cope when we're feeling uncomfortable. Jon Kabat-Zinn calls them stress reaction cycle habits. I think of them as window of tolerance, window narrowing habits. These are things that might soothe in the short term, but they're not giving us real recovery and they become our go-to.

12:48So it might be alcohol in the evening to come down or a lot of caffeine in the morning to kind of wake up. It could be a lot of comfort food or junk food eating. It could be constant doom scrolling or a lot of binge watching of television. It could be self-harming behaviors or real adrenaline junkie behaviors. I was a massive adrenaline junkie over-exerciser and I thought that was me keeping in shape. It actually was one of the ways that I was trying to manage this constant stuck-on-high like anxious kind of energy. And then in terms of emotions, there might be anxiety, there might be constant irritability or impatience.

13:28Many people don't think of irritability and impatience as a sign of dysregulation. It is. It could be waves of overwhelm, or we might have a lot of problems with procrastination or this like whipsaw between a lot of procrastination and then this insane binging, like pulling all-nighters to catch up. I know that's a very common one in high-stress professions, especially among leaders. That's to give a sample. There's many others. To make the point for your listeners, this is really global, and we don't tend to think of these things as all connected. You know, I think that it would be easy for people listening to this to think that maybe their situation is unique, or somehow their brain's broken, or their mind-body connection is broken.

14:12What's the science behind this? Because I think when I started diving into that, I think you said it was like it was a relief. Yes, it was. And for me, it was a tremendous relief too to know that so much of this behavior is just my brain, primitive brain, trying to keep me safe. Yes. And it doesn't do a great job, frankly. Over functions sometimes. It does. And And that's in large part because of what we are trying to do. We are wired organically to be able to mobilize the energy to manage a crisis or a stressful situation and then recover. And our ancestors that shared the same wiring that we have, who did not have 24-7 constant activation and constant demands the way that we do in modern life today, they could mobilize the energy when a saber-toothed tiger was there and fight it or flee from it.

15:09And then they would hide out in a cave and they could have a lot of time to have their system recover. They didn't have the email dinging and they didn't have traffic happening and they didn't have bills to pay and all the other things that keep many of us constantly turning this on and not turning it off. Short answer on the science, we each have a window of tolerance to stress arousal that we've wired throughout our life, when we are inside our window, we can have all of our thinking brain functions, executive functioning, paying attention, making plans, following through, remembering things explicitly that we need for work, conscious decision-making, all those functions still online and working well.

15:49And we have the capacity to vary how much arousal our mind and body are experiencing without going outside the window. So we have our survival brain keeping us safe, moving, bringing as much activation as it needs so that we're meeting whatever's happening with what we need, and then we're recovering enough. We're keeping our thinking brain online so we can make decisions. We can integrate these two systems. Most of us, though, in our culture have moved outside of our window or we very much have narrowed our window because we've been turning stress activation on without getting a full recovery.

16:28And that means we're leaving the system constantly running in the background. And that begins to build a stress load. The science term there is allostatic load. And the more our stress load grows, the less capacity we have in our mind and body to meet the next challenge so that it becomes a bit of a vicious cycle. And we know that we're on the kind of edge of our window or outside of our window of tolerance when we either default like I did to that suck it up and drive on, that thinking brain override, just sort of suppressing and compartmentalizing everything. And it's that fuels a survival brain unconscious kind of lock system, sort of, oh, whatever that is, it's too big.

17:10It's too scary. It's too much. I'm saving that for later. I can't uncover that thing now. It's too big to manage our face. And we just sort of shove it under. It takes a tremendous amount of effort for our system to do that. And that then drives so many of these symptoms that we end up developing, that effortful keeping it at bay. I did that for 25 years. It took a real cost. The other way that that can manifest is then our survival brain is driving it and it kind of hijacks our system. And we might collapse into kind of overwhelm, or we might have a really bad temper, or we might have, as you said, very intense anxiety, or we might get very impulsive or reactive.

17:56That's also outside the window. And there's plenty of examples of that in our world today.

18:08Well, the title of your book is Widen the Window, which kind of presupposes that that's possible to become more resilient and more able to deal with the stressors in a healthy way. So explain more about the window and then how can we widen it? So we each have been wiring this window before we were even born because a big component of how much stress arousal our window can handle has to do with how we wire our brain, the thinking brain and the survival brain, both systems, and how we've wired our autonomic nervous system. which connects from the survival brain down into all of our organs. So it controls breathing and heart rate and our digestive system, our ability to rest and relax, our reproductive functions, all of that controlled by this unconscious system.

19:02And when we're born, we have the ability to turn stress on and we have the ability to get into that paralysis overwhelm. It's called freeze, one of the kind of evolutionarily oldest of our responses. But when we're born, we have not yet wired how to downregulate after stress. In fact, as humans, because our system is so socially, we have so much social wiring, we are built so that we learn the downregulation through the soothing we receive from our parents and other early caregivers. And that presumes that our early caregivers and parents were regulated enough to do that for us. So for many of us, my parents, my dad was back from multiple tours in Vietnam.

19:52He had PTSD. My mom was dealing with some massive postpartum depression because of things going on in her life. Neither of them were really down regulating. So from the very beginning, my system didn't learn that capacity. So from the very beginning of our life, we might have a narrowed window. Other children might have parents with wider windows. They learn it. But later in life, if we experience arousal and don't recover, the window narrows. But it's not a one-way ticket that it only goes in a narrow direction. Everything about our mind and body is the result of repeated experiences. And most of our repeated experiences come from habits, often unconscious ones.

20:33But once we understand that, how much repeated experience is the leverage point, we can start choosing different repeated experiences. When we go into that anxious worrying loop of the to-do list, recognize, oh, I'm worrying, and we can interrupt it. And we can redirect our attention somewhere else. And over time, that habit atrophies. And if we're redirecting it somewhere that the survival brain perceives as safe, that actually starts conditioning a process that makes the system move back in the way that we're organically built, which is to go through stress and recover naturally. We just, most of us are overriding it all the time.

21:14So it is fully possible to rewire and widen our window, but it's not, and this is part of our kind of, we want everything immediately in our culture thing. Everybody wants a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet about our biology. Like it took me more than three decades to narrow my window that much. It didn't take me more than three decades to widen it, but it wasn't like I could do it in a weekend like that. I mean, it took constant choice over several months to begin to have that change. Well, it seems like so many of those experiences get hard-coded into our biology. And so we develop these neural pathways that it's just like you said, I mean, there's a trigger, we run the program.

21:57There's a trigger, we run the program. And unthinkingly so. Yes, it's totally unconscious. at least initially until we understand the science and we begin to pay attention to the cues that show us that programming has started running. But the human brain is remarkably neuroplastic and even neuro regenerative. And some of the study I've done, you know, has been really trying to get back to that where I've got the ability to make choices where sometimes it just feels like I don't have the choice to do this, but you do. It's just that you're not aware of it. Yes. The first thing is becoming aware of those choice points and then starting to act on them.

22:38And for me and for many of the people that I've trained who have big trauma loads and stress loads from earlier in their life, when that conditioning gets triggered and it just sort of starts again, especially at that point when you start becoming conscious of it, there is this sense of powerlessness like, oh, I'm stuck in this groove. I'm never going to get out of this groove. It is really important. to be able to name this is a choice point. And even if it doesn't fully shift, just naming it and making a small shift, it begins to rewire and update so that the survival brain can now perceive that we do have agency.

23:17And that is a really critical part of being able to start having the shifts happen in a more substantial way. That updating of the survival brain sense of there is agency here because when we don't perceive agency, when we feel powerless or helpless, that actually leads to higher levels of arousal and it really re-solidifies the prior conditioning. So being able to access that choice point is really critical in beginning to shift it. I don't want to get too much in the weeds, but I want to ask you about the vagus nerve. There's a lot of attention in this work and somatic experience therapy about the vagus nerve.

23:56Could you explain that in layman's terms, and this is what you're so gifted at, and help us understand that and what we might be able to do with regard to that to improve our situation? Absolutely. The vagus nerve is really implicated in our parasympathetic nervous system. Our autonomic nervous system has a sympathetic branch, which you can think of as like putting pedal to the metal. It's the fight or flight. It's the mobilizing energy so that we can respond to a threat. The parasympathetic nervous system has two branches, and they run down the vagus nerve. And there is the dorsal branch that runs down the backside of the body, and it connects into the digestive system, into our sexual organs.

24:42And the ventral side, down the front of the body, connects into the face, the eyes, the throat, the voice, down into the heart and lungs. So the parasympathetic side, sympathetic is the gas pedal, parasympathetic is the break. And it allows, it has three different functions that are working depending upon whether our survival brain has perceived safety or danger. The functions are slightly different, but in general, it's doing rest, digest, recovery, sleep. And it's also providing our ability to connect socially. So humans, number one, most adaptive response to threat is actually social engagement.

25:27We're wired that way. And that's why the ventral, the front side, the ventral parasympathetic nervous system controls social engagement, controls our eye muscles so that we can make eye contact and widen and squint. We can make smiles, controls our facial muscles. It controls our ability to modulate our voice as I'm doing with you right now and my hand motions. It controls our neck and head muscles so that we can move and orient and find the thread around us. And then it controls our cardiovascular system and our breathing system. It goes down into the heart and lungs. So ideally, when we're inside of our window, the ventral parasympathetic nervous system is driving the show.

26:08It's letting us connect with people, ask for help, offer help. We can orient to what's going on. and we can up and down regulate our heart rate and breathing rate without having to turn on all the stress hormones. That's our first line of defense. If we have wired our ventral parasympathetic, that part of the nervous system doesn't come wired when we come out of the womb. That part gets wired through childhood until about 16 years old. So again, if our parents had narrowed windows, if they were coping with a lot of stress and trauma, or if they were absent, if they had mental illness or they were incarcerated, they are to help us wire those things.

26:48It's one of the ways that narrowed windows get transmitted intergenerationally and why trauma can become intergenerational. So that's our first line of defense. If that's not working in whatever the situation is and our system, our survival brain perceives, wait a minute, that's not enough. It will then turn on the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight, starting to mobilize and it's a mobilized defense, starting to mobilize energy to move our muscles and be able to fight or flight, bring a lot of glucose into the brain so that we can focus and figure out how to handle it. And if that's not enough, then we fall back to the third line of defense, which is called freeze.

27:30The ventral, the front side of the vagus nerve gets turned off. The backside gets turned on in its defensive mode, and that sends us into this very immobilized response. So when we're experiencing traumatic stress, it's very common for us to get confused or dazed or paralyzed, sort of so overwhelmed we don't know how to respond, that deer in the headlights kind of response. And our system is moving onto a spectrum to start shutting us down. So we can be really spacey. We can feel like we're not even in our body. Our breathing gets really shallow. We start oxygen conservation. So it's really important when we go to widen the window to recognize that ventral and dorsal parasympathetic in the vagus nerve, they're going to switch on and off.