Understanding Anxiety: Rewiring Your Brain for Better Health with Dr. Karen Cureton [Ep. 102]

0:00 This is the Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well podcast. I'm Lisa Salisbury, and this is episode 102. Understanding anxiety rewiring your brain for better health with Dr. Karen Cureton. Dr. Karen Cureton is a licensed naturopathic physician, acupuncturist and neuro-plasticity practitioner. Today, she and I discuss anxiety and the limbic system and fight or flight, which you've probably heard about. But Dr. Cureton has a different way of approaching the solution to anxiety rather than just through the thought feeling pathway. Stay tuned to hear how chronic anxiety can affect other systems of the body, including our ability to release weight. We also discuss what a healthy amount of stress is and in what situations.

0:42 That might occur. Welcome to Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well; the podcast for women who want to lose weight, but are tired of counting and calculating all the food. I'm your host, Lisa Salsbury. I'm a certified health and weight loss coach and life coach, and most importantly a recovered chronic dieter. I'll teach you to figure out why you are eating when you aren't hungry, instead of worrying so much about what you are eating. Welcome back to the eat well, think well, live well podcast. I'm delighted to have Dr. Karen Cureton on with us today. She is a naturopath and I'll let her introduce herself and tell us all about what she does.

1:25 And then we'll get into our conversation. Dr. All right. I'm a naturopathic physician and an acupuncturist and also a neuroplasticity practitioner. The last one, a lot of people are probably going to go, huh, what is that? Well, you know, we've accumulated a lot of science, neuroscience in recent history, but how we can change the brain to have it produce more of what we want. Um, including, you know, different sort of default emotional responses in our lives, and it turns out that that is really important for health that if we're spending too much time, you know, in fight or flight or in freeze, you know, these stress responses or survival responses.

2:08 Then, um, it derails our health and that can include our weight, actually, and, um, our relationship with food can be dramatically impacted by that if food is one of the early coping mechanisms we learned for, you know, dealing with our emotions, right? Which so many, I mean, that's so common because that's pretty easy for parents to be like, Oh, you're fussy. Let's feed you Here's a snack. And I mean, it's just, and, and by the way, like as parents, nothing's gone wrong. Of course you did that, you know, cause I'm a parent, I did that. Like, Yes, everybody's doing it.

2:50 It's not like you've ruined your kids if you did that or something. It's just that it's just part of our lives that we learn from a very young age that food helps. Yeah, exactly. And I think that where our, culture and society have sort of fallen short is really in Emotional intelligence and learning other coping mechanisms that truly work for helping us deal with our emotions, not only in the moment, but also to change the patterning so that our emotional habits don't keep replaying in our lives over and over again. And so that's what I help people do now is to rewire primarily their stress patterning that is fueling.

3:33 You know, unhealthy behaviors that aren't really serving them and they don't want, um, as well as their health, their physical health. and a lot of people that are working with me are working with me specifically because they have those kinds of issues that they want to recover from or change, you know, change in themselves. Yeah, being a naturopath is such a different type of positioning, such a different type of doctoring. People come to you really not so much because they have an acute illness, but that they want to up level their health in some way. Would you say that would be accurate? Yeah, I would say I don't tend to treat acute illnesses very often, but my practice has historically always been focused on people with chronic illnesses because that's the population that tends to fall through the cracks of conventional medicine.

4:25 But you're right. The other population is people who are doing okay with their health. They just want to have optimal health. Right. And so naturopaths are also much, much better at that because we just have better training for that. Yeah, optimizing health, I think is just so underrated and really part part a little bit about what I do as well as a health coach and life coach. I talk about how life coaching is appropriate for people who are functioning, but want to up level. If you're not functioning, you're not getting out of bed. You're not being able to go to work. You need therapy. If you're doing all those things, but you're like, I want to achieve more.

5:05 I want to reach more goals. I want to, you know, A lot of times for me, it's with my clients, it's weight loss goals or improving their relationship with food. And so they're like, I'm doing okay, but I could be better. And so I love that we have that kind of thing in common. So I think I really like connect with naturopaths. They are not the first one I've had on and I, and I work with my own naturopaths. So, um, yeah, one of the things we really wanted to dive into is the. Relationship to our emotional eating with anxiety. So a lot of us really struggle with anxiety, and I assume I also like to clarify this and kind of be clear that because I'm not a doctor, and you know, this is not medical advice, we're talking about little a anxiety, we're talking about everyday anxiety, that emotion that we all experience.

6:01 We're not talking about big a. clinical anxiety, needs a diagnosis, needs medication. I, would you be, would you agree with that? That's kind of what we're talking about in this amount of anxiety. I am actually talking about the kind of anxiety that becomes chronic, right? So we have this We all have anxiety from time to time, right? That's part of a flight response, right? And every single human on the planet sometimes goes into flight. And when you're in flight, you're likely to feel anxious, or worried, or scared, right? That's the emotional state that goes along with it, right? But what can happen that... Really can have a more significant impact on our health and our weight is when the limbic system in the brain, which is responsible for determining if we're going to go into fight or flight or into freeze, it can get confused based on your life experiences and misinterpreting them as a disease.

6:59 Thank you. more threatening than they are. And once that happens, then somebody can become chronically anxious, which goes into that realm of the diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. But I'm also speaking to people out there who have very specific triggers for their anxiety, but every time they encounter that trigger, they get really anxious. So it's this Um, learned pattern, right? So, like, performance anxiety or social anxiety or, you know, parenting's anxiety that's 24 7, anything like that, um, can also be rewired in the brain so that it stops playing out in someone's head.

7:40 System and in their lives. And once you're able to do that for people, then their health can recover, including they can lose weight more easily. And I'd be happy to explain that a little bit further. But that's the kind of population we're working with. Okay. So, it really is, though, a lot of general population, we're not, I guess what I mean is, if you have disabling anxiety where you probably need to be medicated, I just am really cautious that people don't take, General podcasts as medical advice, because if you have that type of anxiety that is completely debilitating, you need to see a doctor. Yeah. You know, what I like to say is like, if you have a really severe mental illness going on, you know, you are struggling with things like active mania, active suicidality with intent and a plan, you know, psychosis, schizophrenia, personality disorders.

8:36 All those things are outside the realm of what I do. But if you are just a highly anxious person. We help people like that all the time. People who are having panic attacks daily. We help those people to resolve the panic attacks, stop the panic attacks without medication. And that doesn't mean that somebody can't lean on medication temporarily as they're doing this work. That's totally okay. However, you know, we also know that some of these medications are incredibly damaging actually. And so if somebody can avoid taking a benzodiazepine, I highly recommend it. Um, but that is a decision for you to make with your own mental health practitioner.

9:20 But even so, those we do know the data on benzodiazepines now is that they damage the brain over time and they make it much more likely that you'll develop Alzheimer's disease. So I, you know, part of My passion around this topic is to help people not have to go that route towards medication that could end up harming them more than helping them in the long term, right? So, yeah, so rewiring the brain, oftentimes we are able to get people out of panic attacks in somewhere between a week and a month. Their panic, we are able to stop their panic attacks from replaying. In terms of chronic anxiety, let's say somebody has been highly anxious their whole life.

10:05 That type of patterning, you know, usually takes longer to resolve because you have a huge neural network in your limbic system that is very strong and very potent and very easily triggered. And the bigger and stronger a neural network is in the brain, the more likely it is for its... you know, firing to occur. And so that means that if you've got a huge neural network for anxiety, then you're very likely to feel anxious a lot of the time, right? So when you want to rewire something like that, it takes a little bit longer because you've got to break down that neural network. And the way that we go about that is a very specific, uh, approach to rewiring things in the limbic system.

10:51 So, our approach involves addressing the roots of the tree, which is usually memories and belief systems. So, usually, when somebody is highly anxious, and has been their whole lives, early in childhood, there was usually a number of events that made them feel less safe. In the world, and it could be really simple stuff. It's not always big traumas. A lot of people think, Oh, my childhood was okay. I don't have a reason for being highly anxious. Well, my childhood was okay, too, but I ended up a extremely anxious person for over a decade of my life. And until I found these tools, and I tried many approaches to mental health before that.

11:35 Talk therapy, did absolutely nothing. Um, you know, I did like shamanic work and psychedelic therapy and so many other things. And it just didn't touch my own trauma or my own anxious patterning. But rewiring the brain is what actually did that. And that's the story a lot of my clients have too, is like, wow, I tried everything. I thought nothing was going to work. This actually changed things for me. So, how do these conditions really, impact the rest of the body then, if we've got all these, all this anxious energy happening, like, how does that impact other systems and other parts of the body? Yeah. So when we, you know, flip into fight or flight, right.

12:18 And as I was talking about the emotional correlates of flight, our anxiety, worry, fear, things like that, when we are spending a lot of time in that state, or even we're just, we just flipped into it. What happens is the limbic system made that signal and it said, Hey, it's time to go into flight. And then that signal got transmitted from the brain to every single organ system in the body. And every single organ system in the body will change its physiology. And the reason for that is to try to give you everything you need in order to run away. To save your life, right? That was the whole point.

12:58 The whole evolutionary point of our nervous system. Having these survival states is that if we were in a true danger, we could be more resourced to get ourselves out of it. Right? So, unfortunately, though. When our physiology changes like that and it stays that way for extended periods of time, then it really impairs a lot of things with our health. Our digestion shuts down to a very great degree. The immune system becomes imbalanced. Hormones become imbalanced. Detox shuts down the all kinds of things that my chronically ill patients struggled with, and that I used to struggle with as well.

13:40 And so that's why regulating the limbic system can be so critical to people with chronic health issues to recover. But let's tie that into weight. So with weight, you know, in a fight or flight reaction, we release a bunch of adrenaline and cortisol. Cortisol is our stress hormone that comes from the, uh, adrenal glands. And cortisol has a couple different roles in the body, but one of them is to release blood sugar stores. Right. So if we need to run for our lives, we're going to need a lot of fuel to do that, right? So we have fuels stored in our liver at all times and so the liver can then with the signal of cortisol dump a bunch of that glucose into the bloodstream and if that's happening on a regular basis and we're having so much glucose in the bloodstream that we don't We're not actually able to use all of it.

14:38 Right. We're not actually running for our lives. So we're not actually burning through that glucose. Then it will get stored as fat. from the liver into the fast horse. Into the bloodstream and then if it can't get into the cells, then the body will usually convert it into fat and that fat in particular with cortisol tends to get deposited around the midsection. and so what we see in a lot of our clients is as they become better regulated and they stop spending lots of time in fight or flight that the weight just starts to slowly melt off because they're not continually putting more in storage there.

15:18 that makes sense. How can you tell if you are in flight all of the time? Like, because that's the issue, is to be in fight or flight, um, I assume mostly. Fight or, so I assume mostly the flight is the issue. I've heard also that it can be fight, flight or freeze, which I don't know how that can affect. but, I notice in my life, Things that are going on circumstances that are happening. I feel like, Oh, there's so much, but I don't know. If I'm in that fight or flight state, does that make sense? Because especially I've been studying a lot of in perimenopause and menopause, how it's so important to keep our stress level down.

16:00 I think this is primarily the reason is because of this reaction, but. I feel like I'm having a hard time implementing that because I'm not quite sure how to tell. right. Yeah, that's a great question. So for everybody out there, here are some telltale signs that you may be in flight and then we'll talk about fight and freeze because those are the two other physiological states that have nervous system correlates to them. So, with flight people, like I said, you're, if you are in flight, you are absolutely going to be anxious, afraid, or very worried.

16:41 Right, so if you are feeling that emotional state, you're in that emotional state, any of those, a lot of the time, you're in flight. That's, it's as simple as that. The other things to look for though are, if you are, if your, your heart rate is higher than a normal resting heart rate, if your blood pressure tends to be too high, those things both go along with flight or fight, actually, you know, shallow breathing and tight muscles. So when we're in fight or flight, the, the muscles all tighten up. And so a lot of people say, Oh my gosh, I carry my stress and my tension in my shoulders.

17:21 And there's a very good reason for that because the vagus nerve is intertwined with the nerve that controls these, the trapezius and the SEM here in the neck. And so when you go into fight or flight and the vagus nerve shuts down, boom, these muscles go. And they contract, but so do the muscles in your whole body. And so if you're noticing a lot of tension, a lot of the time, and let's say you're trying things like massage or heating pads or, you know, hot tub, things like that, and you're not really getting relaxation in your muscles for very long, if at all, That's another really good sign that it's because your nervous system is doing that to your muscles, not because you had a local injury or something like that.

18:08 Um, the other thing to think about in terms of chronically tight muscles is magnesium deficiency, but, with, fight. All of the physical stuff I just mentioned are telltale signs people tend to notice with fight as well because fight or flight are two sides of the same coin. They both are mediated by the sympathetic nervous system. So, um, when somebody's in fight, the difference is that they will be in a different emotional state. So they'll either be, you know, angry or annoyed, super agitated, irritated, resentful, things like that is what you'll find when somebody's in that state. So people can look for, you know, just be more mindful of your emotional state and see where you're hanging out the majority of the time.

18:54 For freeze, the emotional correlate is something along the lines of depression. So, a lot of people, um, who are chronically depressed are chronically in a freeze state and a lot of people are getting out of depression permanently by rewiring their limbic system for this very reason. So, depression, apathy, lack of motivation, Dissociation can be actually one manifestation of it. Usually that's a pretty strong freeze response. All these responses are on a gradient, I should mention, too. So, you know, you may be mildly angry or you may be severely angry, and that will tell you the degree of the nervous system state that you're in, right?

19:36 So you're in a stronger fight state if you're super angry. Um, so that's With freeze, there are different physiological effects because that one's actually mediated by a totally different nervous system pathway called dorsal vagal. And so that one, you know, does have effect on every single organ system of the body, but different effects. So usually freeze leads to low blood pressure, low heart rate, slower breathing. Basically it's in the opposite direction of fight or flight. So. That helps a lot of my clients to remember it is to just go, Oh yeah, they're kind of opposite from each other.

20:17 So does that help to Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think really just thinking about where you are emotionally during the day, checking in, how am I feeling? I think, um, probably because especially for me lately, I've been feeling mostly just overwhelmed with every, like with a lot of Just kind of things I have to do, task list, right? Like, task list, out of town, things I've got going, weddings I'm planning, that kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. So, I just think, where am I? Like, am I, like, this feels stressful to me. There must be some amount of healthy stress.

20:59 Um, and I don't feel like I'm in any of these, but I also have a lot going on. So tell us about if they're, you know, healthy stress as far as where, what can we experience that just is challenging and good for us it doesn't create problems. Yeah, so you know, there's a couple things to say about that. One is the duration of time. the least amount of time you can spend in these states, the better for your physiology, for your entire body. So, it's normal for us to go into these states. But how long we spend in them makes all the difference. So, you know, if you notice yourself getting really anxious about something, then it's best to, you know, early on, like, acknowledge that and go, Oh, yeah, I'm, I'm working myself up or I'm feeling really anxious about X, Y, Z.

21:53 And then the goal from a neural retraining perspective is to attend to that. As soon as you can to basically use your limbic system, teach your limbic system that what is going on that's making you anxious is actually not a life or death threat, because that's what it thinks, right? That's what these states were designed for. So if your brain is, you know, going into fight about, you know, a deadline you have at work in two weeks, that's not an appropriate use of fight and we need to help ourselves. Get out of that. But you're right that you know, we can just have a lot going on. What that does to our nervous system, though, is going to vary depending on the person.

22:37 So we need to be really honest with ourselves and say, Well, how is my nervous system responding to how much I have going on? Right? And and to just If it is not responding well, if it's overwhelmed and manifesting that is fight, flight or freeze, then we, you know, want to attend to that and do something with that early on so it doesn't just keep affecting our physiology for an extended period of time. The other thing is that, you know, with these nervous system states, there are hybrid states. So, you know. The survival states, as we've talked about, are fight or flight and freeze, but we also have this, uh, healing state that we want to be in.

23:17 Ideally... 90 percent of the time or more, so that if that helps people kind of know what the goal is for health, that's what it is. So we want to see you spending over 90 percent of the time in rest, digest and heal, right? And that nervous system state, as we know, is conducive to healing, to optimal physiology and pretty much every way for non survival situations. Right. But when you are in your everyday life, and let's say you are, um, playing a competitive sport, when you're doing that and you're getting worked up competitively, but you're not actually in a state where you're ready to pummel somebody to death, then you are in a hybrid state, right?

24:02 You are in a state where you're You're firing the neurons for rest, digest, and heal, and you're firing the fight neurons at the same time. So you can be somewhere in the middle, and that is actually not considered an unhealthy state. It's not considered detrimental to our physiology. So if you're spending a lot of time like that in, in a play state or a competitive state, That's okay. That's normal. That's good. That's healthy. the other, uh, hybrid state is between freeze and safe and social or rest, digest and heal. Those are two names for the same thing. So, uh, when we're in that hybrid state, it's usually when we're doing something like, being intimate with somebody that we, we love that hybrid state helps us to be still and really be calm and feel safe for intimacy.

24:54 So hopefully that helps a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so you talked a little bit about some of the things that you do with your clients. Is there anything that people can implement on these types of things on their own at home that they might be able to start working a little bit on rewiring? It's sounds like it's a little bit similar to what I work with, with teaching people to be aware of their thoughts and feelings and how we rewire those things. I just taught a lesson this morning to a client about how to think new thoughts, basically, you know, just, just different ways to do that. But I assume your tools are a little bit different. Can you tell us some of those introductory things? Yeah, so, um, the tools are definitely different, the typical approach to psychology has been to try to go through thoughts to change feelings, and that is a valid approach, however, it's not the most potent approach, So this approach that we use that really rewires the limbic system uses, feeling or state change to teach the limbic system to do something new, not cognitive or conscious thought change.

26:07 And it, and it's, it's the limbic system or these subconscious parts of the brain, that's how they learn best. So that's how we implement it. And people can try it out for themselves for totally for free online. There are two different. Sort of freebies that we have created for people to just get to know what is this even like, you know, and Because a lot of people have never experienced it. So one of those you can find at Get wired for wellness. com backslash free the other one You can find it get wired for wellness. com backslash anxiety. And so yeah, those are there's like Um, eight free, uh, neural retraining processes in there of different styles.

26:50 So people can just get a sense of what is this like? Do I like it? Is it working for me? And when people try it, I would suggest that you use it on something that is making you feel stressed or anxious, right? So the way that rewiring the brain works is you have to actually activate the neural network that you want to change. And so that means that in order to change anything about your stress or anxiety patterning, you need to be feeling some of it when you do one of those activities. So the easiest way to do that is to just think about something you're stressed out about. And I would suggest you do this with something that's like up to an eight on the intensity scale for you, like zero to 10, you're up to an eight. 9 or 10 is so intense that a lot of people need help with those things.

27:33 So like big T traumas from your past and things like that. Usually you need some help with that, in order to not re traumatize yourself. But if it's some kind of stressor that's getting you a maximum up to an 8, then great, go for it. You can rewire that on your own quite easily. good. And are these just like videos or, yeah, so there's, educational videos where we really dive deep into what it means to rewire the brain and what all things that can help you with and what really is anxiety. How does it work? How do we become chronically anxious and then get ourselves out of it? All kinds of things like that. How do you actually stop panic attacks?

28:14 There's a whole lesson on that. So there's that, but then there's the like eight free. You know, processes, and those are videos, mostly, I think there's one audio, so. Okay. Great. Great. Well, we'll put all those links in the show notes. Was there anything else you wanted to add on helping people with this topic? Yeah, you know, I would just say that, you know, if you're out there and really struggling with your relationship with food or with weight, I really highly recommend looking down this road of, Of stress, ultimately, because for many people, that's at the root of it. Not always, but many people it is. And it's something that I think we all need to look at.

28:54 We all have dysfunctional stress patterns that we can improve upon. So, you know, it's not actually difficult work either. That's one thing that I hear a lot is people go, Oh, I just, you know, this is going to take so long. I just can't open that Pandora's box. It's going to be hard. It's going to be painful, blah, blah, blah. It's not, it's nothing like talk therapy. You do not leave crying and more upset than when you came. Um, and it's, it really can be a very fast process. So, you know, suspend, I guess, your, reservations and. Check it out. You've got nothing to lose. It's very safe. Okay. That's really good to hear.

29:35 Cause when people attempt these kinds of things on their own, I'm glad you qualified, like don't do this with big T trauma, but, yeah, it's nice to be able to have resources for things that we can work on on our own. So I really appreciate that. And I appreciate you being here. So thanks so much. Thank you. It was my pleasure. If this episode has helped you in any way, all I ask is for you to share it, share it with one friend or share it on your social media tag me, and I'll give you a shout out. I'd also love for you to leave a five-star rating on apple and Spotify and review the show on apple podcasts. Have a great week and as always, thanks for listening to the eat. Well think. Well live well podcast