week in review 23-7-26
round up of this week in body-led healing
Greetings fellow human,
That’s it, ey? World Cup is over. Almost like the weather knows it. Sweaters are back on in Northern Europe, but that is an incentive to clear out the toxins in the sauna. Anyway, hope the week has been kind to you. Let’s begin.
The most shared media pieces from the last 7 days, excerpts from program 2 in the Somatic Academy: ‘What if Love Was Your Highest Expression? Why Separation Is the Root of Our Suffering and How the Body Can Save Us:
We started with the intelligence scores, showing a 10,000-year trend of a positive selection for genes we consider associated with high levels of education today. Then we threw a bucket of cold water on that by seeing the trend over the last century, where it has reversed. Same with brain volumes, so we shouldn’t be surprised. Who has smaller brains? People with ADHD. Lowest Expression Inclusion Culture cheerleads our devolution. But we don’t like hearing such news today because we like to pretend we are the most evolved. Also a worldview of the last century. I am here, with a recent birthdate, I must be superior. Yet, your grandma going to church each Sunday was an anti-inflammatory event. Which inflammatory cytokine has a dose-dependent inverse relationship with Church visits? IL-6. What is that associated with? ADHD symptom severity. Why? Because it goes around to your synapses and upregulates the excitatory ones, downregulates the inhibitory ones, and when we have too much neural excitability, the brain starts to shrink. Do we have to go to Church? No. We can if we want, but what we are required to do is recognise our new baseline. If we are not getting together and carrying out an activity that upregulates the endogenous opioid system (e.g. World Cup) and downregulates inflammation (e.g. yoga, sauna, cold water swimming), we will be disorganised. That’s not a stranger’s fault. That’s not a school’s fault. We don’t have a rights problem. We have a responsibility problem. We…take…the…body…to…calm.
The second most shared video of the past week was today’s video. A simple reminder that if we take the gut bacteria from a human with ADHD and place it in a rodent, its hippocampus falls apart. Why? The hippocampus is one of the most stress-sensitive regions of the brain (and also called the mediator of our personality). The gut is quite capable of remodelling our brains, simply via inflammation. When we tell children ADHD is their identity, we are telling them to turn around and swing amongst the branches again. Let’s not do that.
The third most shared video can help us with the second most shared. 15 years ago, the ADHD research centre in the Netherlands discovered that an elimination diet was able to drop ADHD symptoms by over 50% in as little as 9 weeks. They were so pleased with the result that they came up with the term ‘food-induced ADHD’ and recommended that doctors screen for this sub-group before medication. What did everyone do instead? Head off on the biggest ADHD diagnosis drive in recorded history. Expand the entry requirements, destigmatise the condition amongst both parents and patients, and successfully increase prescriptions by 10 times in the last 10 years. Cultural poverty.
An update on work in progress. First section of program 3 is drafted. We pick up the GABA switch, which we also covered in program 1 (The Defense Cascade), but take it a step deeper across the lifecycle.
What is the GABA switch? When you are a bun in the oven that is your mum, your GABA is excitatory. Ooo, flash bang, our world shakes. ‘GABA? Excitatory? I heard it was our primary inhibitory neurotransmitter!’ Yes, that’s correct. 10 points. However, it is only inhibitory when the plug in the chloride sink is pulled. That plug is KCC2. That pulling is gradual. Like most of our development, it takes about two decades.
However, importantly, it doesn’t happen on its own. The primary mechanism for its upregulation is oxytocin. Oh damn. There it is. The root of our suffering is our separation. What is the most influential factor in predicting a child’s oxytocin levels? Their attachment scores to their parents. Our humanity as we imagine it is a fragile elevation above feral. It is maintained by active intervention. Today we pretend it’s a fate. It’s not. We are seeing the consequences of that. What conditions are associated with low KCC2 (and thus immature GABA)? We know at least:
ADHD.
Autism.
Seizures.
Schizophrenia.
Stress reactivity.
Sensory sensitivity.
The seizure is interesting (particularly as someone who has experienced them). The by-products actually ramp up KCC2. So we can say a seizure is like a kill switch on neural excitability. Personally, I’ve slept upwards of 20 hours after one.
Over to Monday Meditation. This week we started with a reminder of the relationship between sex hormones and stress. That is, the more stressed you are, the less fertile you will be and the more terrible you will feel. Not rocket science, but again, our culture today refuses to target them despite their decades-long decline that Dr Shana Swan calls ‘Countdown’ because projecting trends into the future will mean we can’t reproduce. Fun. Then we carried out our regular Aum breathing and meditation.
Lastly, our country rankings. The Aussies retain top spot, Poms in next, and Germany in third as a country, but the Deutsch have seemingly been overtaken by the culmination of all other countries. So to all new entrants, welcome. I hope the material serves you well.
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I’ll leave it there for now.
Here’s to your healing 💙,
Jas