Digging Deeper to Heal Anxiety, Depression, PTSD, and Autoimmunity with Don Wood, PhD

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, we’re breaking down the fascinating connection between unresolved trauma, chronic inflammation, and the nervous system. Dr. Don Wood explains how past experiences get "stuck" in the brain, keeping the body in a constant state of stress and driving symptoms like anxiety, autoimmune issues, and even chronic pain.

We discuss why emotional trauma can show up as physical illness, how it alters immune function, and—most importantly—how to reprogram the brain to stop running old stress patterns. Dr. Wood also shares real-life transformations, including how healing trauma helped an athlete break a world record!

Don's FREE video series "3 Hacks To Reset Your Mind". Here's the link: https://www.inspiredperformanceinstitute.com/3-hacks-video/

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• How unresolved trauma keeps the nervous system stuck in survival mode
• The surprising link between stress, DNA, and inflammation
• Why depression is often unresolved anger (and what to do about it)
• How past emotional wounds show up as physical symptoms
• A simple test to know if you’ve fully processed past trauma
• What happens when you release stored trauma—for health, performance & longevity 

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ABOUT GUEST:
 Dr. Don Wood discovered the link between unresolved trauma and chronic health issues while searching for answers to his daughter's autoimmune condition. This led him to develop the TIPP program, a neuroscience-based approach that provides immediate and lasting relief. His work has helped trauma survivors, elite athletes, and executives, including a double-amputee marathon runner who broke a world record and the first athlete with Down syndrome to complete an Ironman. He is also the author of You Must Be Out of Your Mind and Emotional Concussions. 

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://www.inspiredperformanceinstitute.com/ 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drdonwood/ 

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY:

• Over restriction is dead; if your practitioner is recommending this, they are stuck in 2010 and not evolving
• Whole food is soul food and fed is best
• Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
• You don’t have to figure it out alone
• Do your best and leave the rest

SPONSOR:  
Thanks to Jigsaw Health for sponsoring this episode! Try their MagSoothe or MagSRT for better sleep and less stress. Use code LESSSTRESSED10 at JigsawHealth.com for 10% off—unlimited use!

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Don Wood, PhD: why would you be anxious? Why does the mind get anxious? Everything it does has a purpose. It doesn't just become anxious because there's nothing else to do. Your mind is trying to protect you.

[00:00:12] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On this show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

[00:00:41] Christa Biegler, RD: One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

[00:00:59] Christa Biegler, RD: Today on The Less Stressed Life, I have Dr. Don Wood. And after searching for answers about his daughter's autoimmune issues, Dr. Wood made the connection between trauma and how it affects a person's thinking patterns, behavior, and health, and how it can be solved. He understood that merely coping and medicating wasn't the answer.

[00:01:15] Christa Biegler, RD: because you were just treating the symptoms and not the cause. His experience with his family provided the determination that he needed to do comprehensive research and develop a cutting edge neuroscience approach called the TIP method. His clients have ranged from trauma survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing, victims of a Las Vegas shooting, to world class athletes and executives, as well as servicemen.

[00:01:35] Christa Biegler, RD: One of his clients was a double amputee marathon runner and broke the world record twice after working with Dr. Wood, and another became the first person with Down syndrome to complete an Iron Man, among many other success stories. Dr. Wood has written two books, maybe another coming about his research, including the science about how our minds work and why we experience our own unique perspective of the world.

[00:01:55] Christa Biegler, RD: Both books, You Must Be Out of Your Mind and Emotional are focused on how we can all make the desired changes by allowing our mind to reset and reboot. I think he has a study coming out, which we'll talk about today. Welcome to the show, Dr. Wood. 

[00:02:07] Don Wood, PhD: Thank you, Christa. That was good. You got it all in.

[00:02:09] Don Wood, PhD: Perfect. 

[00:02:10] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I moved some things around. There's a lot, sometimes there's a lot to say, right? Like, how do we wrap this up? I actually think one of my favorite, I heard you speak last month at James Wedmore's conference. And yeah, that's how this all started. And I love a good story, and I just felt like you had a really cool story.

[00:02:26] Christa Biegler, RD: I also love stories about pivoting and this rebirth, and you had a little bit of that too, like you completely changed the trajectory of your life after your daughter's diagnosis. So I'd love for you to open up with how you got here, which is probably your daughter. And, will you tell us a little bit about her story?

[00:02:42] Don Wood, PhD: Yeah, wasn't doing this. I've always been an entrepreneur all my life in different businesses. And I was in insurance, mortgages, real estate, energy business. And so I think that was the advantage for me though, being an entrepreneur, because when my daughter was diagnosed, when she was 13 with her first auto abuse disorder called Crohn's we had no idea what Crohn's was.

[00:03:04] Don Wood, PhD: And they told us there's no cure for it. We don't know what causes it. She's just going to have to manage this for the rest of her life. And then she ended up with a second autoimmune disorder called idiopathic pulmonary hemocytosis, which is a lung issue and where she would just start coughing up blood.

[00:03:21] Don Wood, PhD: And the iron in the blood gets released and then she could choke to death on her blood. So at that point is when my wife said to me, you need to figure this out or we're going to lose our daughter. So I went back to school in my fifties and started to study and do the research to try to figure out what they told us was something that there was no cure for.

[00:03:42] Christa Biegler, RD: How did you decide to go into psychology though at that point with these medical conditions? 

[00:03:47] Don Wood, PhD: It was interesting because I really felt like they weren't really treating it right. So I thought brain is really the computer. So my thought was first, let's figure it out from that side. And so I really started looking at the psychology side of it as opposed to, which I now know absolutely for my daughter, is the physical were the symptoms.

[00:04:07] Don Wood, PhD: They were not the issue. So once I started connecting up trauma, And the research I was doing, so many people have these autoimmune disorders. There's all kinds of health issues. I'm sure you see it all the time in what you do, and they immediately go to the physical. 

[00:04:25] Christa Biegler, RD: Exactly. That's 

[00:04:26] Christa Biegler, RD: why I'm surprised you went into a not, a little bit of a non physical profession at that moment.

[00:04:31] Don Wood, PhD: Yeah my wife had trauma as a child and although she was functioning really She was still struggling with the trauma with a lot of emotional issues. She didn't get into drugs or alcohol She was just struggling with fear all the time and my daughter was just not really showing that she was showing more of the health issues, she had ear infections, throat infections, she was always getting sick.

[00:04:55] Don Wood, PhD: And what we didn't know at the time when the first diagnosis of Crohn's was that she had trauma. She had never disclosed it to us and it wasn't until the second autoimmune when I started doing the research that we said to her, is there something we don't know? And that's when she disclosed that she had some trauma when she was six, between six and eight.

[00:05:15] Don Wood, PhD: And then that's when all the, I think I was just led here. I really do. I think it was just divine that I showed up in the psychology world because I realized it was really coming in from the psychological side. 

[00:05:30] Christa Biegler, RD: For sure. So after, I feel like you've summarized it really well. When you were talking about being an entrepreneur, I was thinking about You weren't going to be told, no, you were going to figure something out, right?

[00:05:41] Christa Biegler, RD: It's ah, thanks. Thank you for this path that is like a kind of a dead end. Let me go try to find my own and trailblaze my own path. There's probably quite a few years in between there, between her. I can see how that second diagnosis made you, I think the first diagnosis is serious and the second one felt.

[00:05:57] Christa Biegler, RD: Probably extremely scary as parents and even as a 13 year old to have irritable bowel disease diagnosis. It's still quite a lot. So you go back to school in your 50s and then what happens? What was the path like or maybe even just the resolution? What happened after you started researching this?

[00:06:16] Christa Biegler, RD: Understood what the possible root causes were. How did that kind of play out for your daughter? 

[00:06:21] Don Wood, PhD: As I was trying to figure out what it was, and we now know that there's a trauma base to it. I started looking at how does the brain respond to trauma? What is going on from the brain side? And that's not really what many people look at.

[00:06:34] Don Wood, PhD: They'll say, oh, I have anxiety. I have depression. I have panic attacks, whatever it is, but that's what they're treating. And what I'm saying is those are the symptoms of the problem. So I have a very different approach to it. When I say, if somebody says, I think this was the entrepreneur in me, when somebody says I have anxiety.

[00:06:53] Don Wood, PhD: I went, why? So that's the scientist in me. It's like, why would you be anxious? Why does the mind get anxious? Everything it does has a purpose. It doesn't just become anxious because there's nothing else to do. Your mind is trying to protect you. So I said, and I think you heard me speak at the James Widmore BBD Live.

[00:07:15] Don Wood, PhD: What I said is think of anxiety as the message. It's the email that comes into your inbox. It's trying to get your attention. It's trying to get you to focus on something. The message in the email is what you want to be focused on. So what is the email telling you? And chances are it may be a glitch. It may be an error.

[00:07:36] Don Wood, PhD: So I said, think if your bank sends you an email saying there may be suspicious activity on your account and you don't ever look at your account there could be, but there may not be. But if you don't examine it, you're going to keep getting the email until you answer the bank. And say, no, this isn't a fraudulent activity or yes, it is fraudulent activity.

[00:07:56] Don Wood, PhD: So that's what anxiety is. So if you look at it, what is your mind what's it actually asking you to do? 

[00:08:04] Christa Biegler, RD: I know you talk about the brain being. So I wanted to invite you to share kind of your perspective about that, but then also the impact of trauma on the immune system. And maybe even I don't know, that may not be something that you work on those specific little pathways, but we have.

[00:08:25] Christa Biegler, RD: Pathways, like you can find these in the research that show stress chemistry speaks to the immune system, and the immune system gets out of balance, TH1, TH2 gets out of balance, and then you can have symptoms, like you were describing, sinus issues, allergies, etc. And so I remember when I first saw one of these graphics that an immunologist published, and I thought, this is exactly what I'd been seeing in clients, because Something I saw was that they would have increased physical manifestations of their symptoms if they had a chronic period of stress, which is a different, is one of, I don't know how we would define trauma, and maybe we should, because I think trauma gets a little bit stigmatized.

[00:09:01] Christa Biegler, RD: And I know you like to reduce that stigma around trauma, and you brought up, your daughter's trauma, but a lot of people will say, I don't even have trauma. And actually, that's probably a great place to start. It's What if someone doesn't realize they've even got, if you've got a Boston Marathon bombing person in front of you, if you've got someone who is in the military, they might realize, oh, this is a trauma.

[00:09:21] Christa Biegler, RD: But in your wife's case, I don't remember her story specifically, but you said she was dealing with a lot of fear. Some people might have called that anxiety. Can we talk about maybe trauma as a thing or how you might define trauma or what if you don't think you even have trauma? 

[00:09:39] Don Wood, PhD: So I've had people say to me, I don't really have any trauma, but they may not be recognizing what trauma is.

[00:09:44] Don Wood, PhD: So not everybody has the big T Boston Marathon bombing issues. That's why I wrote my second book. I called it Emotional Concussions. An emotional concussion could be the overly critical parent or the teacher that told you were stupid, right? Or made some sort of a comment or you got bullied. And they're not thinking I don't really have any trauma, but all of those things have a, an effect on the way the mind works. And so when we were talking about immune system, what I've been showing is that, and this is what I'm doing the study on when we have unresolved trauma, it actually affects the DNA, the way the DNA is being read and transcribed.

[00:10:25] Don Wood, PhD: So the genes that regulate inflammation upregulate with unresolved trauma. And the reason it does that is inflammation is a response to trauma, physical or emotional. So if you were punching me in the arm, my arm, that's trauma to my arm's gonna swell up. And the purpose of that is the cells go into a cell danger response to protect the arm.

[00:10:48] Don Wood, PhD: So there's nothing wrong with inflammation, it's an okay response. The problem is when it stays chronic. And what trauma does is keeps running in the background, keeps the inflammation high because it's looping through the trauma, thinking that there's still a danger, but there's no danger. It's information about danger.

[00:11:11] Don Wood, PhD: And so that's what was happening to my daughter. So her Crohn's is really just inflammation. And so the genes that regulate that or up regulated, and when that happens, the genes that regulate the immune system down regulate. So now you've got the perfect recipe for disease. High inflammation, low immune response, and there's where autoimmune comes in.

[00:11:34] Don Wood, PhD: And so that's what it was for my daughter. And what I'm proving in the study now is that when we take them through our program and we resolve the trauma, the inflammation is coming down. The immune system is coming up. It's fascinating. 

[00:11:48] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, for sure. So we've talked a little bit about trauma.

[00:11:50] Christa Biegler, RD: I know you have some feelings about the word trigger as well. 

[00:11:55] Don Wood, PhD: I never liked the word trigger because I said it sounds negative and violent when people would say, Oh, that triggers me. Why would your mind trigger something? It's activating. It's turning on your nervous system. And the reason it's doing that is because it believes there's a response required.

[00:12:11] Don Wood, PhD: So your fight or flight, your sympathetic nervous system response is an emergency management system. It's designed to turn on when there's a threat and shut off when there's no longer a threat. The problem is that system works perfectly. If the system is in the present, so if there's a threat and you feel fear, that's a perfectly designed emotion to get you into some sort of an action.

[00:12:38] Don Wood, PhD: But if you feel fear when you think about something that happened five years ago, it's a glitch, an error message. Your mind is reading data, old data in real time, turning the system back on or activating it. It doesn't need to be activated. That's what I thought. 

[00:12:57] Christa Biegler, RD: It's making five years ago right now.

[00:13:00] Don Wood, PhD: Because your subconscious survival brain only understands now it's fully present all the time. And so trauma is stored in high definition in the way it's stored in memory. And it's that high definition that keeps activating the nervous system. 

[00:13:17] Christa Biegler, RD: That makes a lot of sense if you think about it, because your body's primary role is survival.

[00:13:22] Christa Biegler, RD: And so if you think about prioritizing what's going on in the body, we would say that was in the history, let it be in the history. But your body would say, I actually need to read and code threats and remember those. So that way I can be actively responding to them in the future. It's simply just another one of its, it just makes perfect sense.

[00:13:38] Christa Biegler, RD: If the primary goal is survival, that it would store old Negative experiences or traumatic experiences, whether we saw them as traumas or not in that high definition or in that easily accessible state, something that happened. This may jog your memory before we scheduled.

[00:13:56] Christa Biegler, RD: I think I mentioned something about. Asking my dad if he would go through your program, because he's in his 70s now, and somewhere in the last five to seven years, he had knee surgery, and he was always a very hard man on the outside, right? He was in the Vietnam War, and so when he went through knee surgery a number of years ago, he was coming out of anesthesia, and the nurse said, What was happening to you?

[00:14:18] Christa Biegler, RD: Like you were, you had a lot of activity in your body when you were coming out of anesthesia and he's Oh, I was right back in Vietnam. To my knowledge, that had not happened to him. So something, and , I would say like over 50 years later that was coming to the surface.

[00:14:32] Christa Biegler, RD: And you hear stories like that, but I wanted to give a tangible example of something that was in high definition. He was like, it was like I was right there again, all over the place. And speaking of someone who's not processed through trauma it was very vivid. So do you want to talk a little bit about PTSD?

[00:14:50] Don Wood, PhD: Yeah. So what makes it unique for humans is we store explicit detail about events and experiences. So the way I explain it is if I asked you, crystal, what you ate for dinner last night, can you tell me what you ate for dinner? 

[00:15:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Most people cannot. Last night I had spaghetti and green beans. Very Midwestern

[00:15:08] Don Wood, PhD: Right? . So when I asked you that though, you saw pictures right? Of what you ate? 

[00:15:13] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:15:13] Don Wood, PhD: Just get three beans maybe where you were when you ate it. Only humans store that kind of detail. Now, last night wasn't threatening or disturbing, so it's stored as a fairly low resolution file. Enough details to record it, but nothing specific that would cause an intensity.

[00:15:29] Don Wood, PhD: But if you had a traumatic event, all your senses are heightened. Sight, smell, hearing. So now when it's recording it, it's turning on the high def. Now that memory is stored with tremendous amounts of details. That's what keeps activating the nervous system. Because when you think about it, so for example, the Boston Marathon, as she's talking to me to telling me what happened five and a half years earlier, she's shaking and crying.

[00:15:57] Don Wood, PhD: And I said, you know why you're shaking and crying? And she says because I'm talking about it. And I said but your mind thinks there's a bomb about to go off. It's looking at that, excuse me, at that data in real time. So what I do is take that high definition memory and get your mind to reprocess it into the same format as what you ate for dinner last night.

[00:16:20] Don Wood, PhD: You don't forget it, so you still have access to the experience so you're more knowledgeable of experience. But it's not going to turn your nervous system or activate your nervous system. 

[00:16:31] Christa Biegler, RD: I have a, another really, a much more silly example. I was flying home last week and I went through border patrol and they took my really cool lemons.

[00:16:43] Christa Biegler, RD: And I was very frustrated with border control for six hours, and I remember thinking in my head like, what is wrong with me, inherently, that I could be annoyed with them for two because I was reprimanded, and I was like, this Activated something in me, and I was like, what is wrong? And as you're talking about it, I remember thinking about it at that time, because when you go through like personal development, and you're working on layering the pieces, I was just like, I stopped and really thought about it, because I think I was thinking about how you're describing high definition, low definition, and I was thinking about How we sometimes block out memories or we may not about how many people cannot even remember what they ate yesterday, but it's a maybe a very low detail if you're walking around in a high stress environment, quite often, your body is prioritizing information.

[00:17:29] Christa Biegler, RD: So it would be easy for you to forget low priority information like what you ate yesterday. If your day was higher stress, it's like a possible. Yeah. So as I'm thinking about how you describe this, I'm like, Oh, that activated something. And I was thinking about it at that moment. I was like, I cannot believe I am so annoyed.

[00:17:47] Christa Biegler, RD: I keep thinking about this. This is so silly and I'm not sure why, like there's something here. And so obviously and what it was like a reprimand. And so I'm sure I'm a thousand percent positive that there's something there from my childhood about being reprimanded that I do not like, and I really stuck with it.

[00:18:04] Christa Biegler, RD: A silly example, but it just reminded me. 

[00:18:07] Don Wood, PhD: Yeah, the way you explained it was perfect. So what happened is, the reason why hours later you were still upset about it, is your mind was not okay with being reprimanded, and it wanted you to do something. So the purpose of an emotion is to call you into an action.

[00:18:24] Don Wood, PhD: There's no other reason to have an emotion unless your mind wants you to do something. So if your mind is feeling Anger, what does your mind want you to do? Fight back. So it may have been asking you to fight back about being reprimanded by border control But it also may have been looking at some older information where you didn't fight back and you got Reprimanded and your mind's not okay with it And so calling for an action, maybe about something from 20 years ago, but it has not, it's not really representative of in context to where you are right now.

[00:19:02] Christa Biegler, RD: So let's talk about what happened. I'm obsessed with the concept of emotions stored in the body. I've got lots of books on this topic, emotions stored in the body, never die. So if you have an emotion that's calling you into action and you do not take the action, what happens? 

[00:19:18] Don Wood, PhD: So what your mind is going to do is figure out a way to protect you from the pain of being constantly called into action, it will go into depression.

[00:19:26] Don Wood, PhD: Depression is the absence of emotion. So now you don't feel. So how your mind has decided to protect you is stop calling for the action, so it shuts down the action calls, which means there's no emotions. And so when people come in to me and they'll say I'm depressed I'll ask them in most cases Tell me what you're angry about they'll go.

[00:19:47] Don Wood, PhD: i'm not angry. I'm depressed I go. Yeah, depression is anger Your mind is being calling you into an action about something You can't do anything about and because you never answered the call because you can't answer the call Your mind protects you by stopping calling for the action and then you go flat.

[00:20:06] Don Wood, PhD: It's a very different way. I say depression is a function of the brain, not a dysfunction. Your mind's trying to protect you from pain. 

[00:20:14] Christa Biegler, RD: So I had a really interesting thing a year or two ago. I used to say that I was inpatient and then I learned, I became aware that impatience was another word for anger and that felt very I was like, I couldn't stop thinking about that.

[00:20:29] Christa Biegler, RD: I was like, I don't think I'm an angry person. But I want to bring this up because when we talk about things stored in the body in traditional Chinese medicine, they say the anger is stored in the liver that can present as skin issues. And these are just things I see all the time. And people ask me about these every once in a while.

[00:20:43] Christa Biegler, RD: Maybe even tension in the hips and Maybe you have opinions about that stuff, maybe you don't, but I bring this up because I'm using my own example of how you can maybe feel a little uncomfortable when you first arrive at this, right? If people come into your office and say, I'm depressed and you tell them that they're angry depending on how that conversation goes They may not receive it at that moment.

[00:21:02] Don Wood, PhD: It's interesting. Yeah. Because when I say that for example, I gave one lady, she came in. She had seen me two years earlier. She had been in addiction for 20, being sober for 20 years, but had a lot of trauma. Took her through the trauma portion of the program. She loved it. Then injured her wrist.

[00:21:18] Don Wood, PhD: They put her on pain medications and everything went haywire. It then had severe major depression. She wanted to commit suicide. They put her in the hospital, medicated her. She wanted to commit suicide again. They put her in the hospital again. And so her husband said why don't you call Dr. Wood?

[00:21:37] Don Wood, PhD: Because after you saw him, you felt really good. And she says this is different. She goes, I don't know what this is. This is just a darkness. I can think about my trauma now, and I don't have any emotion about that. So what he did for me worked. I don't know what this is. This is just a darkness. So she called me up and I said why don't you come in but bring your husband with you because I don't want you driving on your own, if that's the thoughts.

[00:22:01] Don Wood, PhD: So she did, she came in and I said to her, I said, when she sat down, I said, tell me what you're angry about. And she goes I'm not angry. She goes, I'm depressed. And I say, depression is anger. What is your mind asking you to do? And she looked right at her husband and I was like, oh. I brought the fox into the hen house, right?

[00:22:22] Don Wood, PhD: So he didn't pick up on it. And so I asked him, why'd you go grab a coffee? Let us sit and talk for a little bit. And as soon as he left, she goes, Oh my God, it's him. And I said, tell me what's going on. She goes, he's not a bad man. It's not like he beats me or any of that. It's not anything like that.

[00:22:37] Don Wood, PhD: She says he makes me feel guilty all the time. I don't have dinner ready on time The house isn't clean enough. This is wrong and she's so nice. She wanted to avoid confrontation So she just stuffed it down But then when she got on the pain medication similar to what you talked about with your dad Then it comes out because now the blocking the subconscious can't block it anymore.

[00:23:03] Don Wood, PhD: So then it came out and then the anger started showing up, but she didn't know what it was. So it shut down. That's how it was trying to protect her from the pain. She loved her husband. But she says the guilt is just overwhelming. So we, and I said to her, I said, I went, is he Catholic? And she goes, why would that make a difference?

[00:23:25] Don Wood, PhD: But it's just, cause he probably learned that on how to get what he wants. And we brought him back in and he was devastated. He says, Oh my God, he goes, I'm the cause of it. And I said not necessarily, he didn't know you were doing it. And he goes, it's true. He says, I do. And now that I think about it, I use guilt, but my mother used guilt on me.

[00:23:45] Don Wood, PhD: He says, so he naturally learned that as a way to get what he wanted, but he didn't recognize it and she was too nice. She wouldn't stand up for herself. What her mind was trying to get her to do is fight back. Tell him you want dinner on time. You get home early. I'm on, I'm just getting home from work too, but she couldn't do that.

[00:24:05] Christa Biegler, RD: I imagine that relationship. I always think relationship with self and relationship with others or the. Primary causes of stress, right? They bring out a lot. And similar to that husband, you don't always know you're doing it. And I think that's how it is as parents as well. This is something I dealt with for a time.

[00:24:24] Christa Biegler, RD: Fortunately, I had someone come into my life that said, Your children will perceive things a certain way, no matter what, so you cannot be perfect. You just do your best with it, right? I didn't need a thing to worry about, but so you just talked about depression being really the root cause of that being anger and unraveling that can be hard for people.

[00:24:41] Christa Biegler, RD: It's a good story. And then you brought up how this particular woman was dealt with addiction. So similarly, when people have addiction, is there What do you think the root cause of addiction is? 

[00:24:51] Don Wood, PhD: Oh, trauma, for sure. If that pain keeps coming up, so every time you think about, or something reminds you about the trauma that you had, so say, for example, a lot of times with women, who've had a sexual assault, that keeps running and looping in the background.

[00:25:08] Don Wood, PhD: How do you stop that loop? You numb yourself. Using drugs or alcohol, people will say to me why would people use drugs and alcohol when they know how bad it is for you? I said, because it works. It stops the pain. What I say addiction is the symptom of the problem. It's not the problem.

[00:25:27] Don Wood, PhD: But they'll focus on the symptom of addiction. And so the idea is to get to why is the mind needing something to numb itself? And it's coming from this constant loop of memory. That keeps turning the system on as soon as you use the drugs and alcohol, it shuts off. So your mind wants resolution to the pain.

[00:25:50] Don Wood, PhD: And when does it want resolution now, the subconscious operates in the present. It sees no consequences to drugs and alcohol in order to see a consequence. You have to recognize time. Your subconscious has no recognition of time. It's only the conscious mind that does, but the conscious mind is not in charge of survival.

[00:26:10] Don Wood, PhD: It's subconscious. So addiction solves the problem. Creates a whole bunch of other problems. But it solves the problem in real time. 

[00:26:19] Christa Biegler, RD: Did we cover thoughts on PTSD? I know I brought up my dad's story, and then we talked about some things. But I don't know if we talked about, if there's anything else you want to say about PTSD.

[00:26:30] Christa Biegler, RD: And then, where does rumination fit? I feel like it fits in everything. 

[00:26:34] Don Wood, PhD: Yeah PTSD is basically post traumatic stress disorder. So it's post trauma. And that's the memory I'm talking about. So I worked with a U. S. Army sniper who had to shoot and kill a 12 year old. He couldn't stop thinking about it.

[00:26:51] Don Wood, PhD: And so every time he thought about it, he would have to numb himself. So he got into addiction, but that didn't work. They put him on all kinds of medication. That didn't work. So then he was dealing with depression. So all of those things were running, but that's post traumatic stress. Is your mind calling for an action?

[00:27:08] Don Wood, PhD: That you can't take. And so it keeps running through the trauma over and over. And so if there's no solution, because there is no solution, the only solution is to update the memory. Like I talked about earlier, take it out of high definition. And then post traumatic stress goes away. So the lady with the Boston Marathon who came in, she was five and a half years of post traumatic stress.

[00:27:35] Don Wood, PhD: nightmares every night. If you watch her testimonial on our site, you'll see after four hours it was gone. Because we reset the system. 

[00:27:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I like the way you talk about it. I think I, Sometimes in my like corner, we talk about neural reprogramming. I think it's very similar or the same.

[00:27:52] Christa Biegler, RD: So I want to come back a little bit to even your daughter's case, which so you're going into psychology, you're learning about trauma history, you learn about how the body stores trauma. And then you. learn that you can process through trauma differently. And I think one of the questions that comes up sometimes is, how do people know when they've processed through trauma?

[00:28:14] Christa Biegler, RD: Let's pretend they aren't waking up with terror nightmares, right? They have low grade annoyances, back pain. Like things that just make their life suck, but they're not completely ruining their life. They just make it really suck. and those are more like overt things or even people that aren't really like they're intrigued by this topic.

[00:28:31] Christa Biegler, RD: We talk about this in different ways on this show every once in a while. They might want to know, like, how do I know if I've really processed that trauma? I've done all these things. How do I know if I've been effective or not? 

[00:28:43] Don Wood, PhD: Really simple test. 

[00:28:46] Christa Biegler, RD: So a while back, my college aged daughter shared with me that she was tossing and turning and waking up several times per night after a period of stress. We started her on magnesium and her sleep immediately improved. I personally think magnesium should be your first thing to try if you're having trouble sleeping or staying asleep, especially tossing and turning, and it's a no brainer if you have any restless leg issues.

[00:29:10] Christa Biegler, RD: The thing about magnesium is that there's a lot of types of magnesium that will give you symptomatic relief, but I like to steer my clients and loved ones to a more absorbable form of magnesium, because most big box magnesium is magcitrate, and that will push bowels, but it can be damaging to your teeth if it's used daily and it's not the most Rather, Jigsaw Health makes one of my favorite great tasting magnesium powders called MagSue that has magnesium glycinate, my favorite calming and absorbable type of magnesium. It's available in both a great tasting powder and to go packets, and they also make a product that's great for slow release, especially if you have restless legs, called MagSRT.

[00:29:52] Christa Biegler, RD: So, If you are not falling asleep easily or if you have disrupted sleep, you can try at least 200 milligrams of great magnesium like MagSoothe or MagSRT, especially if you have restless legs. It works better to take this at least 20 minutes before you go to bed to allow it to kick in and you can get a on All of Jigsaw's amazing products, including MagSooth at Jigsaw Health with the code LESSSTRESS10.

[00:30:17] Christa Biegler, RD: Now you can use LESSSTRESS10 as many times as you want with every order at Jigsaw Health, which is honestly pretty unheard of with coupon codes. So enjoy the magnesium from Jigsaw with my code LESSSTRESS10.

[00:30:32] Don Wood, PhD: Think about it. And if you feel an emotion, it's still active.

[00:30:37] Don Wood, PhD: So simple. So if you can't talk about it without getting emotional, then it means it's still active and it's running in the background. You should be able to talk about it. We're not going for happy about it. So what we're trying to do is stop the dysregulation, the nervous system from turning on. So we're not looking for, Oh my gosh, I got in this car accident.

[00:30:58] Don Wood, PhD: It was so much fun. We're just saying that got into a car accident. You can describe the car accident without your heart pounding in your chest, without you feeling dysregulated. That's what we're going for. But as long as there's an emotion, it means it's active. 

[00:31:15] Christa Biegler, RD: So that makes a lot of sense.

[00:31:16] Christa Biegler, RD: What about someone who, maybe I'll give my dad's example, who's got a hard exterior. Someone who shoves a lot of emotions is a self protective thing. In fact, one of the people I was talking to this morning, she was talking about her back pain , and she's thinking about her own auto immune and food issues.

[00:31:30] Christa Biegler, RD: And she's really thinking about the things that were going on in her life around that time for the first time after being. In clinical work for a very long time, what about people who maybe are not aware they're just numb to that emotion, right? They're so hard on the exterior that they don't even know how to feel that emotion.

[00:31:47] Don Wood, PhD: Then it'll show up physically. Cause you can't get around it. It's going to show up in something. So if somebody says, for example I worked with a guy, very high functioning guy, four and a half million YouTube subscribers, Evan Carmichael. And he said, let me go through your program.

[00:32:04] Don Wood, PhD: We'll put it on my website. And so he said I don't really have any trauma. So I said, okay. He says, so what are we going to do? And I said we'll go through it and see what shows up. Cause there's always something in there. And so when we first sat down, he has an aura ring and the aura ring, he says, my aura ring tells me I'm stressed.

[00:32:23] Don Wood, PhD: He says, but I don't feel stressed. And so either the aura ring is wrong, or I don't know what stress is. So two hours into our four hour program, we take a quick break. Can he comes out and he goes, I don't know what you're doing, but my aura ring now tells me I'm in restore state. And this is because that's where we're going.

[00:32:41] Don Wood, PhD: We're starting the restore state. And so anyway, we did a pre DNA test on him and a post DNA test on him, and the results were a 52.6% reduction in inflammation and 113% increase in immune system response on a person who thought, I don't have any trauma. It shows up in the physical. 

[00:33:04] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Did you do blood work?

[00:33:06] Don Wood, PhD: Yeah. So we just do a blood sample and we do the pre DNA and then a post DNA, same way, and then measure the, immune system response, the inflammation response, a whole bunch of different things. It actually shows the we had one lady who went through the program, super physically healthy. She exercised all the time, ate right, but had trauma.

[00:33:28] Don Wood, PhD: And so anyway, she says, I know I have trauma. It has definitely effect on me. She's in the cosmetic business. She looked incredible. She really took care of herself, her face, everything that she did. She looked much younger than her age. And the pre DNA test showed that she was three years younger than her chronological age.

[00:33:48] Don Wood, PhD: So she was doing something right. And she's one of the ones in the study, took her through the program, showed the changes in inflammation. She had about a 48 percent reduction in inflammation and about a 50 percent increase in immune system response. But the most fascinating part of it, Her telomeres increased by 10 years.

[00:34:10] Don Wood, PhD: So she, and the 30 days of audios that they do. So the idea is the system adjusts it's designed to adjust. And so what now the DNA was showing was more accurate of how good she looked. But internally, it was still running. 

[00:34:29] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, what you just shared makes perfect sense because I work with all of the people where it shows up in the physical manifestation.

[00:34:37] Christa Biegler, RD: And so I see a lot of very highly successful people, highly successful women just you just grit and go on. And I don't know if you've ever heard this. They say that entrepreneurs have. Very often have higher trauma response history or trauma history, and that's why they're very good at just like white knuckling through painful things and this has been showing to me in different ways.

[00:34:57] Christa Biegler, RD: I realized that, oh, I have a higher threshold for pain than maybe somebody else that I work with potentially, like it's become obvious. And then I also, which is, it's also quite fun because I'll have clients who I'm like, are we the same person? Your case history and my case history look exactly the same.

[00:35:14] Christa Biegler, RD: And I would say they all struggle to access and find that emotion, right? They've just been like living on that surface. And so it shows up physically. So that makes perfect sense to me. 

[00:35:24] Don Wood, PhD: Yeah. And that's why the people that you're dealing with, that's exactly why you're dealing with them is because it's going to show up in the physical side, even if they don't think it's showing up on the psychological side, but you can't say, I always say, use the analogy of you get into your car and you've got a beautiful Rolls Royce.

[00:35:42] Don Wood, PhD: You step on the gas all the way down to the floor, but use the brakes to go 30. This is a beautiful car, looks great, right? But the engine's wearing out, the transmission's wearing out, the brakes are wearing out, but you can't see it. But it's gonna show up and something's gonna break down, because it's not designed to do that.

[00:36:02] Don Wood, PhD: Your sympathetic nervous system response is an emergency management system designed to turn on for a threat and turn off when the threat's over, right? The problem is that this unresolved trauma keeps running in the background and keeps it on. So now it becomes an operating system. It's not designed to do that.

[00:36:23] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. The chronic stress. You have another analogy. I'm looking at my notebook right here about ducks and bread. Does that fit here too? 

[00:36:30] Don Wood, PhD: Animals don't have that problem. They don't have this chronic stress problem that we have. They don't store memory the way we do. So they could be in an environment that's constantly stressed, but they're not remembering stress from before.

[00:36:43] Don Wood, PhD: They don't store traumatic memory. Humans store explicit memory. So the duck story was basically the difference between. What I say, a zebra cannot feel fear of a lion, unless a lion's present. Zebras don't store memory about lions. They don't remember the lion chasing them, but they know what a lion is.

[00:37:03] Don Wood, PhD: So they will immediately go into a stress mode. But the duck story was if you're feeding bread and throwing bread into the ducks and the ducks are all eating the bread, but one duck hasn't got any bread. So you go out of your way and you throw the bread to that one duck and the duck gets the bread and just as it's ready to eat it.

[00:37:21] Don Wood, PhD: Another duck comes along and steals the bread right out of its mouth. So if you could talk to the duck, you'd say something like this. Can you believe the nerve of that duck stealing the bread right out of your mouth in front of all your friends? And you know what the duck would say? 

[00:37:38] Christa Biegler, RD: I've never looked this up.

[00:37:39] Christa Biegler, RD: I don't know. I just have experience of having animals. I wonder if they have a little bit of a short term memory. I had a raccoon that, South Dakota thinks, I had a raccoon that would come to my chicken coop every night and eat a chicken or two. And then I would put the chickens And a Cajun side, and then after, and I wonder.

[00:37:57] Christa Biegler, RD: So it was funny because they would roost in the same place and then I put them inside for a few days until I raccoons. the next day I let them out and then they would line up at the garage to come in every night. And they didn't lay eggs for a week. So we always say Oh, they were traumatized at that time.

[00:38:15] Don Wood, PhD: That's the fact they store coding memory. So they code a particular location as maybe being dangerous. They don't know why it's dangerous. They just know there's something about this area that they don't like. That's why if you see like a dog, that's being abused by a man. And then anytime they hear that voice, that type of a deeper voice, they get scared.

[00:38:38] Don Wood, PhD: They don't know why, they have an associative memory. So they associate memory with situations, but they don't store explicit detail the way we do. 

[00:38:48] Christa Biegler, RD: That makes sense. I heard people murmuring at the conference. They were like, I think dogs remember things because and so I bring that because that makes sense even for dog training and things that you would be coding something.

[00:38:59] Don Wood, PhD: It's like that Pavlov, right? So they trained dogs to salivate with the ringing of a bell. They didn't even have to produce food. It was the bell that created the salivation. That's the, it's the same thing. So if an animal is in a particular place and then you bring that animal back to the place, they'll go, there's something I don't like about this.

[00:39:20] Don Wood, PhD: I don't remember they don't cause they don't store it, but their system has coded it as being dangerous the same way they know what a lion is when a lion shows up, that's coded into their DNA. 

[00:39:33] Christa Biegler, RD: Something I work with a fair amount of practitioners and sometimes practitioners ask me about. Mentorship or learning things or helping others.

[00:39:42] Christa Biegler, RD: And I usually tell them that the best first thing that they can do is to heal themselves because you learn such an amount from that. And similarly with your daughter, she became the reason that your life completely changed. And I believe like you didn't tell us the happy ending, but I think at the conference you told us she no longer has either autoimmune condition.

[00:40:03] Don Wood, PhD: Both are gone. 

[00:40:04] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:40:04] Don Wood, PhD: say that's impossible. You can't cure Crohn's. But when I had a doctor, that's what he said to me. He goes, Crohn's doesn't go away. It's either active or it's treated by medication. And I said, I disagree. I said, Crohn's is just inflammation. And that inflammation was caused by the trauma of what happened to her when she was younger, staying active.

[00:40:24] Don Wood, PhD: When we resolve the trauma, we brought the inflammation down, that doesn't make sense to them because that's not how they're trained. 

[00:40:32] Christa Biegler, RD: I always tell people that there can be different inputs you can do for any symptom, there can be nutritional input, perhaps it could be a physical input and there can be an emotional input and there are.

[00:40:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Pretty much always needs to be most of them or if someone's struggling to understand a specific thing, I may talk about it from those three angles. And similarly here, it's you can do, because people will say, know people listening to this would say, with their Crohn's, if they change their diet, maybe it makes a difference.

[00:40:57] Christa Biegler, RD: It may make a difference, right? But also resolving trauma would make a very big difference. And I would say that one of my clients today asked me about continuing education and trying to dispel like fact from garbage things. And I said, success like has common threads, like the truth has common threads.

[00:41:13] Christa Biegler, RD: So you'll find that very different people that have no association with each other will talk about things. So for example, I've had many people come on and talk about the trauma connection between autoimmunity and other conditions. And so you'll see that these truthful things, there's a common thread between them.

[00:41:27] Christa Biegler, RD: Dr. Wood, when does the new study come out? 

[00:41:30] Don Wood, PhD: It's just going out now. So it's going to be published. The first magazine is Brains Magazine, because I'm a writer for Brains who are putting in that, and then we're just waiting for the different. Magazines and publications to pick it up and start writing it.

[00:41:43] Christa Biegler, RD: Those long 

[00:41:43] Christa Biegler, RD: winded titles. I know 

[00:41:44] Don Wood, PhD: it was a really 

[00:41:45] Don Wood, PhD: long winded title. I'm trying to remember now. 

[00:41:47] Christa Biegler, RD: It's okay. I don't have to put you on the spot. Are you also writing a different, is there another book coming out also or no? 

[00:41:52] Don Wood, PhD: Yeah. So I'm writing the fourth book is called don't mess with my DNA.

[00:41:57] Don Wood, PhD: And that's what I talk about is how this unresolved trauma affects the way the DNA and the methylation, which is what you're dealing with. So that will change the methylation. So somebody could be saying, Oh, I'm taking all these vitamins and supplements, but it's not methylated, right? That may be coming from the trauma side, or it could be coming from a physical issue.

[00:42:19] Don Wood, PhD: But you need to look at both of those things and see where it's coming from. If it's psychological, all of a sudden now they can start methylating that vitamin. 

[00:42:27] Christa Biegler, RD: Where can people find you online? 

[00:42:31] Don Wood, PhD: Two places. One at the Inspired Performance Institute, which is our main site, or Dr. Wood Ph. D. Either one of those, you can find out information about our program.

[00:42:41] Christa Biegler, RD: How long has it been since you started doing this kind of work, since you had this kind of shift after your daughter's diagnosis? 

[00:42:47] Don Wood, PhD: About 15 years is when I started to do look at the research. So about 2009 to 13, I was just really trying to figure it out and doing some research and looking at things.

[00:42:59] Don Wood, PhD: 2013, I had the program, the rough draft of the program and started trying to see how it would work. And I got instant results. So I was on the track. Then 2015, we launched the Inspired Performance Institute. And just kept refining it the program we have now just is pretty much what we did from pretty close to the beginning, but with some modifications,

[00:43:21] Christa Biegler, RD: yeah.

[00:43:21] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, that's a good point. I mentioned that a little bit in the bio, and we talked a lot about like chronic health conditions, but how does reprogramming the nervous system help people win marathons? Like better 

[00:43:36] Don Wood, PhD: because I believe that again, the unresolved trauma affects the mitochondria and the cells.

[00:43:42] Don Wood, PhD: So it's pulling power when we release the trauma, we release that power. And all of a sudden now, like Marco just said, Oh, who's the double amputee. I think I described him. He breaks the world record for nine days later, he takes 15 seconds per mile off his marathon time. And then about a month later breaks a world record.

[00:44:01] Don Wood, PhD: And what I said to him, I said, Marco, I didn't make you faster. How can I make you faster that quickly? It was the mitochondria is now available. The sympathetic nervous system is pulling 

[00:44:12] Don Wood, PhD: on 

[00:44:12] Don Wood, PhD: energy. 

[00:44:14] Christa Biegler, RD: And I find ask athletes in general, do you have, they're actually like. Incredibly inflamed is my like nutritional assessment of this.

[00:44:21] Christa Biegler, RD: That's what I've seen over the years. And so anything you can do to like substantially reduce inflammation could increase performance. I don't really function in that space, but I have done that kind of work because there's other ways to reduce inflammation, right? Of course with nutrition. And so that makes sense.

[00:44:37] Christa Biegler, RD: But I'm really glad I asked you that question. Also, the last thing I want to ask is that this is really a. This is like a zone of genius work for you, and so they say Dr. Gay Hendricks calls the zone of genius the thing that you could do forever and it wouldn't feel like work, and so I ask you, is that kind of the future for you, or what is driving, now that you've got the paper being published and the book will be done, is there something new that will light your fire for the near future, the upcoming year or two years?

[00:45:06] Don Wood, PhD: Yeah, great question. My goal is really to get this out to a mass audience. And that's why the online version is the future. Because I'm a limited resource, only so many people can come and see me. But the idea is the online program is getting amazing results. I've got it shot now in virtual reality, so that's the next key is to release it in VR.

[00:45:27] Don Wood, PhD: And then the next version will be AI. We want to have a kids program, a parents program. There's a number of different things that we're going to keep, expanding on. So that's our goal. 

[00:45:39] Christa Biegler, RD: Cool. Thank you so much for coming on today. Inspiredperformanceinstitute. com or drwoodphd. com. It was great to have you.

[00:45:46] Don Wood, PhD: Thank you, Christa. I appreciate it.