Overwhelm & Pain with Former Back Surgeon David Hanscom, MD

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I am joined by former orthopedic spinal surgeon, David Hanscom. In this episode, David tells us his story and what he did to heal himself. He also talks about how to reroute the nervous system, rewire your brain, and heal your body from pain.

Other episodes with David:
#071 Roadmap out of Anxiety and Chronic Pain with Spine Surgeon Dr. David Hanscom (Part 1)
#072 Anger & Anxiety in the Family with Dr. David Hanscom (Part 2)

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• What is expressive writing?
• What is threat physiology?
• The human brain does not tolerate emotional pain, it suppresses it
• Suppressed anger and anxiety causes damage to your brain. 
• What are the disguises of anger?
• The body will create physical pain in order to avoid emotional pain.
• Ways to lower stress physiology
• Ways to improve the resiliency of the nervous system

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ABOUT GUEST:
David Hanscom’s orthopedic spine surgery practice focused on patients with failed back surgeries. He quit his practice in Seattle, WA to present his insights into solving chronic pain, which evolved from his own battle with it. His book, Back in Control is associated with an action plan, “The DOC Journey”, which guides patients in solving mental and physical pain.  His latest book is, Do You Really Need Spine Surgery? – Take Control with a Surgeon’s Advice is intended for health care providers and patients alike to make an informed decision about undergoing spinal surgery. He has created an app and self-directed course, “The DOC Journey,” which presents action plans for healing. His most recent efforts are focused on writing a book on RUT’s (repetitive unpleasant thoughts).

Link to David's resources: https://backincontrol.com/resources-2/
Link to expressive writing pdf: https://backincontrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/DOC-Expressive-Writing-4f-1.pdf

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://backincontrol.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drdavidhanscom/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drdavidhanscom
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DrDavidHanscom

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Work with Christa in 2024: My calendar is currently OPEN for intro calls! If you’d like help with overcoming food sensitivities, improving energy, inflammation or eczema in 2024, book a call now to start in January or February! I can’t wait to help you feel better as we start a new year!  Click here to book your call. 

Reset in Sedona: I have an EXCITING announcement to share with you! I’m hosting a wellness retreat for women who crave good food and adventure in April in Sedona, AZ. For more info, CLICK HERE. If you’re interested, please fill out the form and I’ll be in touch, but DON’T WAIT! The response has been AMAZING and there are only 8 spots! Click here for the form!

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TRANSCRIPTS:

[00:00:00] Dr. David Hanscom: Emotional pain is processed in similar circuits, but you can't control it. You can't see it. You get to suffer. Humans don't tolerate emotional pain.

[00:00:09] Christa Biegler: stress is the inflammation that robs us of life, energy, and happiness. Our typical solutions for gut health and hormone balance have let a lot of us down. We're over medicated and underserved. At The Less Stressed Life, we're a community of health savvy women exploring solutions outside of our traditional Western medicine toolbox and training to raise the bar and change our stories.

[00:00:36] Christa Biegler: Each week, our hope is that you leave our sessions inspired to learn, grow, and share these stories to raise the bar in your life and home.

[00:00:54] Christa Biegler: Today, I have a returned guest. Dr. David Hanscom was last year in 2019, and I think that was episode like around 70, 71, 72, something like that. He was actually a two part series. The first one we talked about, I think probably back and control and spinal pain or overall pain. And then the second one, we really talked about anger and families, which I think would behoove me and probably everyone to go back to listen to that.

[00:01:17] Christa Biegler: And recently I was just telling him offline that I was interviewing bruce Lipton, who said you should have David Hanscom back. And I said, I really remember enjoying him at the time and sharing your work with a lot of people. So since that time, you quickly got on my calendar. I started rereading your book and just loved it.

[00:01:35] Christa Biegler: So I cannot wait to have a new conversation about what you're excited about right now. Let me Hanscom, he had an orthopedic spine surgery. Practice focused on helping patients with failed back surgeries. He quit his practice in Seattle, Washington to present his insights into solving chronic pain, which really evolved from his own battle with it, which will start stories.

[00:01:55] Christa Biegler: I think are really how we get engaged with someone. So his book called backing controls associated with an action plan called the doc journey. So he's got that book, another book. Do you really need spine surgery? Take control with a surgeon's advice. And then another book, which we'll talk a little bit about today.

[00:02:12] Christa Biegler: So, out of interest, he's also got a psychology today blog called anxiety, another name for pain, which I thought was really interesting. And he's got a vision to connect clinical medicine with the science and emphasize the importance of the healing relationship between the clinician and patient.

[00:02:28] Christa Biegler: So welcome back Dr. Hanscom. 

[00:02:31] Dr. David Hanscom: Thank you. Happy to be back. 

[00:02:33] Christa Biegler: So I've been going through , my own different journey as a clinician that you kind of went through but you were very personally involved which is dang it. Does anything matter except the nervous system? No, that is the thing that holds us back.

[00:02:47] Christa Biegler: And so Your book opens up just a little bit talking about your story, but there's really a wildlife biologist at the beginning. And then he gets thrown from a horseback. He's in a mess. He's seeing you for kind of a second. And it's from his perspective. He's the one who wrote the forward. I think it's in his perspective.

[00:03:02] Christa Biegler: He visits you and you tell him you shouldn't have back surgery, essentially. And you give him an assignment. And the next day he has No back pain from doing this writing assignment and it's kind of unbelievable a little bit and I think that's how it was for you when you kind of discovered this. So will you open this just with a little taste of kind of your story and how you got into this work?

[00:03:25] Christa Biegler: First of all.

[00:03:26] Dr. David Hanscom: Well, I practiced spine surgery in Seattle since 1986, and I was one of those surgeons on both sides of the fence. I did very aggressive surgery. I felt guilty if I could not help people with surgery. And surgeons honestly feel like they are the final definitive answer. And patients think the same thing.

[00:03:42] Dr. David Hanscom: It's a big operation. We're going to solve the problem. The problem is, it's only a solvable problem if there's a surgical problem to fix. So if you have just pain without knowing what the problem is actually coming from, surgery is sort of a random event. It doesn't really work. The success rate of doing a back fusion for back pain is about 25%.

[00:04:02] Dr. David Hanscom: So there's actually double the chance of making people worse with spine surgery. And my world was salvaging spines that had prior surgeries and breaking down. So, for example, I had one gentleman who had 29 surgeries in 20 years, and he's fused from his neck to his pelvis.

[00:04:17] Dr. David Hanscom: And unfortunately, it's become fairly common in this day and age, because we're now doing bigger operations that don't work, rather than the smaller operations that don't work. With bigger operations, there's bigger complications, and people don't deal very well with bail and back surgery. It destroys people's lives.

[00:04:31] Dr. David Hanscom: At the same time, I went into chronic pain myself, which involved 17 different symptoms. I had migraine headaches, my ears were ringing, my feet were burning, there were skin rashes popping up, my stomach was a mess, I had anxiety, depression, bipolar, and OCD all at the same time, and I was a complete mess.

[00:04:49] Dr. David Hanscom: Jumping way forward, I came out of this whole process by accident with this exercise called expressive writing. It was actually put out in David Byrne's book Feeling Good. And I didn't know the data on expressive writing. But it turns out there's over 2, 200 research papers that shows expressive writing changes your body's chemistry.

[00:05:09] Dr. David Hanscom: You have lower viral load, lower inflammation, wounds heal faster, good performance is better, athletic performance is better. It is an incredibly simple exercise. You simply write down your thoughts and tear them up. So the gentleman you just described, his name is Mark Owens. He is a scientist. And he had been in chronic pain for nine years, horrendous pain, high dose narcotics, not doing well at all.

[00:05:33] Dr. David Hanscom: And he'd been in Africa for 23 years, helping save wildlife, but the doctors hadn't asked him about stress. And he turns out he left Africa after his third assassination attempt. And so he's severe stress, his whole body hurts. He broke his back, falling off of a horse. He developed severe chronic pain. And within three days of starting writing, his pain disappeared.

[00:05:55] Dr. David Hanscom: Now that sounds crazy, and most people that start with expressive writing don't have that response, but expressive writing is the one step that starts the process, and so jumping ahead in the story, starting with expressive writing and adding on different layers of things to calm down the nervous systems, people started to heal consistently.

[00:06:15] Dr. David Hanscom: So I've watched hundreds and hundreds of patients heal. I was watching three to five patients every week being badly damaged by spine surgery. I walked into the room one day and saw a kid who was 32 years old paralyzed from an operation he didn't need. And I just said, that's it. 30 years old, went to the computer, I was making rounds, and he was paralyzed.

[00:06:34] Dr. David Hanscom: So I said, I'm done. I can't keep watching people being hurt at this level when I'm watching people get better at this level. I think I came here with a self directed process, minimal resources, no risk. They're going to pain free. So myself, 17 different physical and mental symptoms. They're all gone.

[00:06:52] Dr. David Hanscom: They're gone. Now, going fast forward even further, I started to realize that the mental pain was the bigger problem by far. The research paper heard last week that human beings simply do not tolerate emotional pain. So if you have emotional pain, particularly if you have an average childhood, that your body has a lot of emotional pain stored in it.

[00:07:11] Dr. David Hanscom: That the body will actually create physical pain as opposed to suffering, emotional pain, human beings do not tolerate emotional pain. Also notice that my practice years ago that I had four gentlemen come into my office over a span of two weeks. They had certical lesions. They had, they were on the schedule.

[00:07:26] Dr. David Hanscom: But I looked at their spine questionnaire, and they had put down 10 out of 10 on anxiety, depression, and irritability. I'm going, huh. So they asked them the question, well, if we do an operation to get rid of your leg pain, you gotta live with the anxiety the rest of your life, or we could drop down your anxiety and you have to live with leg pain, what would you do?

[00:07:45] Dr. David Hanscom: They literally jumped out of their chairs and said, well, if we get rid of the leg pain, will my anxiety drop down? I go, no, it's a different problem. So every one of them wanted to get rid of the anxiety. They just said this is intolerable. So it's a huge wake up call for me that people don't tolerate mental pain.

[00:08:03] Dr. David Hanscom: And I realized a lot of people were coming to me for mental pain manifesting as physical pain. But it turns out that the way the brain works that you'll actually choose physical pain. This is unconscious. Of course, there's some physical pain. We can see the suffering. You can validate it. Somehow you have a slight amount of control over it.

[00:08:22] Dr. David Hanscom: You protect yourself against expectations of yourself and other people. So you have some say over physical pain, whereas emotional pain is processed in similar circuits, but you can't control it, you can't see it, you get to suffer. Humans don't tolerate emotional pain. So they came out in a research paper I heard last week out of Arizona.

[00:08:42] Dr. David Hanscom: They did this in the lab and they actually demonstrated that people actually will choose physical pain over mental pain and or the brain will make it up. They'll create physical symptoms. So that's been around for a while, by the way. But surgeons don't know that. So if you come to me with extreme emotional pain, but it's manifesting as physical pain, I haven't asked you exactly what's going on in your life that might be causing pain in general.

[00:09:08] Dr. David Hanscom: I had another woman who is, had 55 years of chronic pain. She's now 86 years old. She's now been pain free for over seven years. She's done the process that we've worked through. And I didn't think after having pain that long that she could solve it. She's pain free. She's thriving. But when the doctors didn't ask her at age 30, her ex husband had committed suicide.

[00:09:34] Dr. David Hanscom: And in 2008 when her pain really got worse, her son committed suicide. ever asked her that question. So in medicine right now, we're not simply, we don't know our patients. We don't know the circumstances. And so we just keep going after structural solutions to a physiological problem. And we're really hurting people.

[00:09:56] Christa Biegler: I have this, we have this same situation in my practice, and I usually talk about this with clients that there's this health triad, and you can put any symptom through the health triad. Is it an emotional, mental, nervous system issue? Is there a structural issue? Or is there a nutritional issue? And there's usually a little bit of everything, but very commonly, as you experience, people come to me looking for the right answer.

[00:10:17] Christa Biegler: Nutritional solutions for inflammation and half of what I'm focused on is the nervous system, right? Because if we don't do that's informing the immune system, which triggers the inflammatory response. And with pain, I, this was really bothering me. For the last year or two. And I did not think of exactly your work when I was noticing it, but I was noticing that people with chronic pain or quote unquote fibromyalgia were they all had depression.

[00:10:44] Christa Biegler: Every single one of them that I encountered. And I had this conversation with a doc that focuses on neuro inflammation recently about the same thing. It's like, once you trigger the brain to feel pain, it's like this terrible loop that's kind of hard to get out of.

[00:10:58] Dr. David Hanscom: Right. I'd like to clarify one thing, is that information is correct, it's a little bit of an overused word right now. 

[00:11:06] Christa Biegler: Yeah. I agree. 

[00:11:06] Dr. David Hanscom: So we usually call it threat physiology. And it consists of several different parts. And so basically physiology, by the way, for the audience is how the body functions, not the structures, how the body actually functions.

[00:11:17] Dr. David Hanscom: And so Bruce Lipton once pointed out really sort of very succinctly was. The difference between a cadaver and a living human being because the structure is there, but it's energy and life and movement. A parked car has no symptoms. You have to turn the car on. And in medicine, we've gone almost completely to structure.

[00:11:37] Dr. David Hanscom: There's even a term called medically unexplained symptoms to say, well, we know you're suffering, but we can't find anything wrong. The term actually should be medically explained symptoms because everything is explained by your body's chemistry. So we talk about threat physiology or fight or flight physiology.

[00:11:53] Dr. David Hanscom: You have It was called inflammatory cytokines, which you just mentioned that inflames everything. By the way, half the brain is the immune system, so your brain itself is inflamed. Secondly, your neurotransmitters, these little chemicals in the brain that allow cells to communicate with each other, go from calming acetylcholine to excitatory glutamate.

[00:12:14] Dr. David Hanscom: So you have now excitatory neurotransmitters, your nerve conduction doubles, then you have cortisol, which is consuming fuel out of the cells, in other words, you're actually consuming fuel out of your cells, and then chronic pain, mental or physical, your brain actually physically shrinks. Then the final thing is, of course, the stress hormones like adrenaline, histamines, all these other things that are actually cranking up your body's metabolism to actually fight or, to survive.

[00:12:40] Dr. David Hanscom: So there's a bunch of aspects that throughout physiology that you're going to hold bodies on high alert in order to survive. So the data shows really clearly that chronic stress kills people, causes disease, illness. And what they didn't teach us in medical school is why. So we tend to think of stress in terms of a psychological construct, and it's just your body responding to danger, and it's consuming fuel, doing what it can do to stay alive.

[00:13:09] Dr. David Hanscom: If you don't go to a rest and regenerate mode or safety mode, you can't replenish the fuel to fight another day. So that's why chronic stress, which does allow the body to refuel and regenerate, is what really causes symptoms, illness, and disease.

[00:13:24] Christa Biegler: So you brought this up. Mental pain is a far greater problem.

[00:13:27] Christa Biegler: This is a direct quote from your book. And you've said this differently. Mental pain is a far greater problem than physical pain. And they both originate from problems at the cellular level because humans don't tolerate emotional pain. So I was complimenting you offline that you do a good job of structuring things so we can understand it.

[00:13:42] Christa Biegler: And then we'll get into this kind of, I feel that this gets a bit esoteric a little bit because there's a fine line between this is all in your head. And actually this is. Kind of in your head, but there are steps to. Change it. So can we first talk about some action items and then I want to get into consciousness and repetitive thoughts, but let's talk about these steps that you've really established for solving physical pain through a mental approach, if you 

[00:14:14] Christa Biegler: will.

[00:14:14] Dr. David Hanscom: So what I've learned since I taught you last week is that they are all exactly the same. So it turns out anxiety, depression, bipolar, OCD, and schizophrenia are all inflammatory metabolic problems. They are not psychological. Period. So when your body's in fight or flight, your brain's on fire, all these different thought patterns start taking place.

[00:14:36] Dr. David Hanscom: All those are found to be inflammatory metabolic disorders. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cardiac disease, autoimmune disorders, cancer, osteoporosis. All those things are also chronic inflammatory disorders. So Dr. Navio is a cell biologist, actually mitochondrial specialist on San Diego. Mitochondria are little engines in every cell that provide energy.

[00:15:02] Dr. David Hanscom: So I'm going to tell you how complex the body is. There are 30 trillion cells in the human body. Each shell has between 1, 000 and 2, 000 mitochondria that are generating chemical action for life. Incredibly complicated. So at the mitochondrial level is when the mitochondrial breaks down as we develop inflammatory response.

[00:15:22] Dr. David Hanscom: It has to complete a healing cycle in order for your body to go to a non inflammatory regenerative state. So the inability of the mitochondria to complete that cycle is what causes chronic disease. Every chronic disease that I can mention has the same problem with the mitochondrial breakdown and inability to complete the cycle.

[00:15:40] Dr. David Hanscom: They're all the same thing. The mental and physical diseases and pain are all the same exact process. Now they manifest in different ways, but the root cause is the same. So he made a really succinct comment, so we have it backwards at the cellular level, even subcellular at the mitochondrial level, that the mitochondria cannot differentiate between mental stress and physical stress.

[00:16:04] Dr. David Hanscom: Can't tell. It's a threat. So the body perceives threat. Your mitochondria and DNA start throwing off butterfly reactions. And again, sustained reactions are an issue. So your survival occurs at the single cellular level. Bacteria have the same response. The reason we have a nervous system because we became complex species and mammals are much more complex than reptiles, more complex than bacteria.

[00:16:34] Dr. David Hanscom: But the survival occurs at the cellular level. So in humans, our thinking brain evolved about 100, 000 years ago or less. It's an add on. And so your entire body is a unit with the nervous system being a late development in evolution. And so I don't need to remind body anymore. We're just a unit with a nervous system actually being a late development.

[00:16:58] Dr. David Hanscom: So have to address the nervous system, but it actually, the nervous system is just a way for cells to communicate with each other at the cellular level. Cells communicate with cytokine to cytokine. Those little proteins that go cell to cell. And then all of a sudden you have like a cut. And the cells say inflammation.

[00:17:18] Dr. David Hanscom: So cytokines go out to bring more inflammatory cells to that one spot. Then the brain reads the signals and sends out more signals. But remember the brain is a late responder. It's not causing the issue, it's helping coordinate, coordinating the response. So, We say the pain is in your body, mental or physical, it's not in your head.

[00:17:40] Dr. David Hanscom: Your head's part of your body, of course, but it's such an incredibly complex unit. So I don't use the word mind body anymore. I just try to say unit response to a threat or danger. And then the sensation generated by that fight or flight response, one of the manifestations of that sensation is called anxiety.

[00:18:00] Dr. David Hanscom: So anxiety is not psychological. It's just a sensation generated by your body's fight or flight response. It's a manifestation of fight or flight. So anxiety just says danger. It's not a psychological diagnosis. And the problem with this, and we'll get into these ruts in a second, which is a repetitive unpleasant thoughts, This is where medicine is really missed the boat.

[00:18:22] Dr. David Hanscom: So we put anxiety into a psychological bucket. It is a million times stronger than your conscious brain. And as Bruce Lipton points out real succinctly that the unconscious brain processes about 40 million bits of information per second. The conscious brain processes 40 so if you remember human consciousness is a late development in evolution and so your unconscious brain keeps you alive it's a gift but remember the sensation generated by your fight or flight response is supposed to be incredibly unpleasant because it's a survival sensation.

[00:18:56] Dr. David Hanscom: The problem that humans get into with our thinking brain and language, we now put a name to it called anxiety, is supposed to be unpleasant, and we get our identity wrapped up with this survival sensation, and it's what we have, it's not who we are. So then we try to take this massive million to one survivor response and control it with conscious means, we have no chance.

[00:19:20] Dr. David Hanscom: So you have a fired up body, fired up nervous system, creating all sorts of havoc as far as I need to survive. It's not generating joy. But remember, life is not our friend. We don't have an inherent right to be alive here. Every living creature has to compete for resources, air, food, water, shelter, safety, in order to survive.

[00:19:40] Dr. David Hanscom: So survival is a challenge. The body is supposed to survive is the number one thing. The second thing is you're supposed to pass your genes on to the next generation. That's also not a right either. So thriving is a late experience as far as life in general.

[00:19:58] Christa Biegler: Okay. 

[00:19:58] Christa Biegler: So It's a, not a brain issue. 

[00:20:02] Dr. David Hanscom: It's a body issue. 

[00:20:04] Christa Biegler: And what I find is the biggest challenge is making this a tangible thing. You mentioned in your book, you talk about, I am not angry. I think is the title of the subsection. When you give people a questionnaire, you ask them a lot about physical pain.

[00:20:22] Christa Biegler: You ask them a lot about mental, emotional pain. And so the elephant in the room is when people don't realize, or they're kind of stuffing these issues down. And this is actually for me, I think the biggest roadblock is I can't tell someone they have a problem that they don't think that they have, or they don't realize or don't have awareness around.

[00:20:42] Christa Biegler: And so. Let's talk a little bit about that huge issue of there are very clear physical responses to stressors of types, but this person might say, but I don't feel stressed because it's such a common place for them. Can you talk about this a little bit more? 

[00:21:00] Dr. David Hanscom: Well, there's a bunch of reasons for that.

[00:21:01] Dr. David Hanscom: First of all, okay, anxiety is just a sensation generated by fight or flight physiology. So it's intended for you to take action to control a situation causing the anxiety. Well, let's say a threat response when you can't solve it, your body kicks in a more intense response to become angry. So anger and anxiety are both threat states.

[00:21:22] Dr. David Hanscom: Anger itself is again, not primarily psychological. It's just a sensation generated when you have to really fight to stay alive. But the problem with anger is it allows approach behavior. Anxiety is flight behavior. There's dopamine involved, so it's addicting, but when you're angry, your chemicals in your body cause the thinking brain to go offline or downregulated.

[00:21:44] Dr. David Hanscom: In other words, you have a certain level of stress chemicals that go to the receptors in the brain that shut down the thinking part of the brain. So one of the obstacles of being angry is that you can't think clearly. You simply do not have physiological access to that part of your brain.

[00:22:00] Dr. David Hanscom: Secondly, is that. That inability to think clearly actually blocks your capacity to learn new information. It's also addicting. But the problem that I had personally is that I suppressed it. In other words, it was normalized for me. I was raised in a very anxiety producing, angry environment. And it was the norm.

[00:22:20] Dr. David Hanscom: And it wasn't until I was 50 years old that the word victim actually entered my mind. Because first of all, I was a victim. I was raised in an abusive childhood. My parents were... charged to take care of me and they didn't. So I was a victim. Remember this is a genealogy of anger, of circumstance, blame, victim, anger.

[00:22:39] Dr. David Hanscom: And one of the biggest ways that we tend to be, stay angry is perfectionism. So you're self critical, which is not very nice., nothing's perfect. So you blame yourself or the situation is less than perfect. Then you blame less than perfect. You're a victim less than perfect. And you're always angry and frustrated.

[00:22:56] Dr. David Hanscom: A lot of people use that as a driving force of not good enough. So I use that as a motivator to actually accomplish things, which I did. I didn't know I was angry. I thought perfectionism was a virtue. I had no clue how deadly it was to my body. So before I get really sick, I started having migraine headaches when I was five years old.

[00:23:16] Dr. David Hanscom: My ears started to ring when I was in my 30s. My feet started to burn. I had skin rashes popping up, but I didn't feel anxious and I didn't feel angry. Didn't, had no idea. In fact, one of the first lines to my wife in 2001, which I'm embarrassed about in retrospect, is that I've dealt with my anger issues.

[00:23:34] Dr. David Hanscom: I had no clue I was angry as hell, didn't have a clue. Every person that heals, including myself, actually acknowledges the victim role. They actually acknowledge their anger. And, I don't like the word forgiveness, it's too big of a word, but they learn how to process their stress physiology to lower their anger response.

[00:23:55] Dr. David Hanscom: And we can talk about that 100%.

[00:24:03] Dr. David Hanscom: Which is the opposite of anger, which is playing everyone to the person has truly healed has learned to acknowledge and process anger. 

[00:24:14] Christa Biegler: I want to go back to how anger felt like perfectionism to you, because at the end of the day, this is how we accomplish awareness and consciousness is saying something that resonates with someone.

[00:24:25] Christa Biegler: And that happened to you as well. For me. I remember, and I've mentioned this a few times on this podcast, but I remember having a moment where I saw something when it talked about how you're not impatient, you're angry. And I just thought I was very impatient, right? Like I wanted to get things done and go places.

[00:24:43] Christa Biegler: And maybe YouTube, that was My the resonant point for me was that impatience was actually hidden anger and something that was a more recent thing, you said this may be a different way, but your brain stops thinking under anger. And so I, have lots of memories.

[00:24:59] Christa Biegler: I do not access from childhood from other phases of life. Like my husband will talk about something. And I just say, I cannot remember that. And apparently that is a piece of all of this as well. It just manifests as different things. 

[00:25:11] Dr. David Hanscom: Well, there's a couple of things that happen with the human brain.

[00:25:14] Dr. David Hanscom: First of all, remember the human brain does not tolerate emotional pain. So we suppress it. It turns out that suppressing your emotional pain is actually more inflammatory than actually expressing it. So it actually causes shrinkage of the memory center of your brain called the hippocampus. So suppressed anxiety and anger actually cause damage to your brain.

[00:25:35] Dr. David Hanscom: So what else are you supposed to do? We're not taught how to process it. So one of the keys going forward a little bit is that you have this massive survival response as a gift. It's your gift of life. You wouldn't survive without it. You couldn't even cross the street without it. So it's a gift. So you can't take it personally because it's a survival reaction.

[00:25:55] Dr. David Hanscom: But we tend to disguise it. So I wrote a list of the disguises of anger. Of being frustrated, being right, strong opinions, being critical, being self critical. They're all disguised forms of anger. Blaming anybody for anything at any level is anger. Blaming yourself is, by the way, the biggest problem that we have as far as being the self critical voice.

[00:26:18] Dr. David Hanscom: So, Angers are universal. It's so normalized that we don't recognize it. The first step in healing , is awareness. But again, anger blocks awareness. So the actual disease process blocks the solution. So that's where I developed what's called the doc journey, direct your own care. It's a sequence just to start getting your brain back in line.

[00:26:41] Dr. David Hanscom: As it starts to open up, then you can start becoming more and more aware. And actually the final solution, as you pointed out several times is simply awareness. I mean, forget about all the courses, forget about my course, forget about everything. The number one thing that causes people to heal is simply being aware.

[00:27:00] Dr. David Hanscom: And there's lots of layers around that statement. Thank you. But that's the essence of the solution is awareness and anger and anxiety. Take you out of awareness. I 

[00:27:10] Christa Biegler: Often say here, not my statement, but we're called to change. Maybe we're called to awareness through either desperation or inspiration.

[00:27:18] Christa Biegler: And pain is one very significant way of desperation. Right?

[00:27:22] Dr. David Hanscom: No, except pain. Remember pain is addicting. 

[00:27:25] Christa Biegler: Yeah. Right. 

[00:27:26] Dr. David Hanscom: Because the pain is powerful. It's addicting. It controls you. It controls other people. And so again, this is the hardest part about the whole process is the power of pain.

[00:27:35] Dr. David Hanscom: Again, physical pain, you can see it, control it, mental pain, you can't see or control. So the mental pain is what's not tolerated. Your body actually will create physical pain in order to avoid emotional pain. That's why people who do cutting, I didn't realize this. I thought cutting was a distraction.

[00:27:51] Dr. David Hanscom: There's actually intense pain relief with cutting. It's not 

[00:27:57] Dr. David Hanscom: subtle. 

[00:27:57] Christa Biegler: People are self injuring themselves. 

[00:27:59] Dr. David Hanscom: Well, but they're actually giving themselves pain relief actually relieves their pain. Remember emotional pain and physical pain are processed in similar circuits. The brain can tell the difference.

[00:28:09] Dr. David Hanscom: The mitochondria can tell the difference.

[00:28:16] Christa Biegler: So you've mentioned a couple of times that if we can get to awareness, the next piece is processing it and the people who heal acknowledge and process their anger, they take responsibility. Can we talk about steps for processing this

[00:28:30] Dr. David Hanscom: so there's a sequence is that the memo thing is always just sort of being kind to yourself.

[00:28:35] Dr. David Hanscom: So you cannot muster your way through this. Mind over matter doesn't work. And so there's two parts to healing. One of those is learning how to develop a working relationship with your survival reactions or fight or flight. It's always going to be there. You can't get rid of it. So the way you lower anxiety and anger, simply lower your stress physiology.

[00:28:55] Dr. David Hanscom: So that's a separate skill set. The other skill set is nurturing joy. And so the real healing occurs as you move your brain into good food, good wine, good friends, spiritual journey, that's moving away from the pain circuits. But the data also shows if you're nurturing joy to counteract the survival physiology, it's actually inflammatory.

[00:29:16] Dr. David Hanscom: Because it's a million to one mismatch of the unconscious versus conscious mind. So learning to regulate your stress physiology is a separate skill set. And there's a process called dynamic healing, which acknowledges that every living creature has to process their environment or stresses.

[00:29:33] Dr. David Hanscom: We call it allostatic loading research. So everybody has stresses in life or challenges. That's the input. Then you have the state of your nervous system that takes all the sensory input in and determines the output of the physiology. So there's the input, the nervous system and the output. The physiology is what determines your health.

[00:29:53] Dr. David Hanscom: So sustained fight or flight or threat physiology causes illness and disease. So you want to decrease time in threat physiology, which will by the way always be there. You want to maximize your time in safety. So there's three portals to do that. So directly lowering stress physiology is things like breathwork, rubbing your forehead, humming, while stimulating what's called a vagus nerve, which is highly anti inflammatory.

[00:30:20] Dr. David Hanscom: So you can directly lower the stress physiology with the nervous system. If your nervous system is hyperactive versus calm, it takes less stress to set off the fight or flight. So things that improve the resiliency of the nervous system are exercise is a big one, sleep is huge, and then diet is also a big deal.

[00:30:40] Dr. David Hanscom: Because if you're eating a really highly inflammatory diet, again, your nervous system is on fire. This is also the place where trauma therapy comes into place. And it's trauma therapy geared towards helping you feel safe. In other words, just visualize a feral cat that doesn't feel safe ever, and it shouldn't.

[00:30:58] Dr. David Hanscom: So you can't talk to a feral cat, you can't convince, you have to allow it to teach you tools to feel safe. So good trauma therapy isn't talk therapy, it's just using tools to allow yourself to calm down and feel safe. So again, the physiology, there's ways of calming things down, breath work, humming, rubbing your forehead, stimulating the vagus nerve.

[00:31:18] Dr. David Hanscom: You can increase the resiliency of the nervous system. But the part that's really critical is the input. What are you putting in your brain that keeps you fired up? So the starting point for every person that's healed is called expressive writing. And we know that thoughts, unpleasant thoughts, actually fire up your physiology.

[00:31:37] Dr. David Hanscom: So what do we do with unpleasant thoughts? We suppress them, which actually makes them worse. So there's a thing we call thought diversion or expressive writing. So we write down the thoughts and tear them up. You're not tearing them up to get rid of these thoughts because there's quadrillions of thoughts, but you're simply separating from the thought and you're tearing them up because you don't want to analyze them because they're just thoughts.

[00:32:00] Dr. David Hanscom: You cannot control your thoughts. And you don't want to analyze them. All these issues that come up aren't issues, they're just thoughts. So expressive writing is big. Mindfulness takes your brains off your pain and other physical sensations or mental sensations. It simply goes to a different sensation.

[00:32:18] Dr. David Hanscom: So mindfulness works. Honestly, restructuring, changing your thought pattern is what was called cognitive behavioral therapy. Again, changes your thought patterns, but the other one that's really interesting and really challenging is what are you loading in your brain? So we don't let people discuss their pain.

[00:32:38] Dr. David Hanscom: No complaining, no criticism, no malicious gossiping, no going on the internet looking for solutions all day long. So it's really hard for people to quit complaining and to quit talking about their pain really hard. But as long as you're complaining, can't heal. You're blaming, complaining, all sorts of stuff.

[00:33:03] Dr. David Hanscom: So anyway, it's not the full thing, just the feeling it gives you, you can process your input differently, you can increase the resilience of your nervous system, you can calm down your fight or flight, but at the end of the day, sustained exposure to fight or flight is what causes symptoms, illness, and disease.

[00:33:18] Christa Biegler: You also mentioned disillusion of the ego, and I suppose we talked about this a few times in different ways and I imagine this was a journey for you as a spine surgeon realizing the work I'm doing isn't helping people and I've got to relearn all the things. So, dissolution of ego can mean a lot of things.

[00:33:40] Christa Biegler: Anything you want to say about that? 

[00:33:42] Dr. David Hanscom: Well, it's also a process. In other words, you have fight or flight physiology, and we create these stories to feel better about ourselves. In other words, we develop self esteem, we develop ego. So first of all, it's a judgment pattern, better than or worse than.

[00:33:56] Dr. David Hanscom: So self esteem is actually deadly. Plus it's a mismatch. It's a million one mismatch of the survival versus your conscious brain. So what happens is you learn how to calm down your survival response. Again, we talked about the dynamic healing model. You don't need the storage. You don't need an ego. And so we're tortured with what I call ruts, repetitive, unpleasant thoughts, and they're considered unsolvable in the mental health world.

[00:34:22] Dr. David Hanscom: What the mental health world missed was a physiology badly. So you put anxiety and anger into a psychological bucket and they're the driving force. So a fired up brain fires up these thoughts. Once the thoughts are out in the open, these bad thoughts get counteracted by good thoughts, but the driving force is still going on the brain.

[00:34:41] Dr. David Hanscom: Then the unpleasant thoughts actually fire the brain back up. So you have a fired up brain, fired up thoughts. Then there's other things in life that fire up the brain. So calming down the nervous system is the key issue of actually solving these repetitive unpleasant thoughts. So what happens is that it's like taking a hornet's nest and shaking the hornet's nest.

[00:35:02] Dr. David Hanscom: The hornets are out of the nest. They're not very happy. And you're trying to solve them with a fly swatter. They're already out of the nest. So the real answer is quit shaking the nest. So as far as solving these repetitive unpleasant thoughts, is that we talk about thought diversion with expressive writing.

[00:35:20] Dr. David Hanscom: But also calming down the nervous system is a huge deal. And when people have problems with repetitive unpleasant thoughts, as you calm down the nervous system, they drop down dramatically. And then the third part where the healing actually occurs, is you move your brain and do what's good. So going back to the original conversation, that you learn how to develop a working relationship with your survival physiology.

[00:35:43] Dr. David Hanscom: You develop to nurture joys, it's a separate process. That's where the healing actually occurs. It's actually moving into circuits that are positive with the brain being so neuroplastic or changing every second. You can create any person that you want. So instead of fixing the problem, which reinforces the problem, you actually move into light.

[00:36:03] Dr. David Hanscom: So in other words, quit finding the darkness, just turn on the light. So again, the reason about the dissolution of the ego is that you can't make it dissolve. But with awareness, you can allow it to dissolve. So once you quit trying to fight the survival physiology, you don't need the story, you don't need the self esteem, the ego starts to dissolve.

[00:36:27] Dr. David Hanscom: So I develop severe problems with intrusive thoughts, and they're gone. I don't have the random thoughts I had before I got sick. When I talk to my patients now, Or people I'm working with, they're not in practice anymore. I mean, these thoughts really cause a lot of suffering. The problem is for the human race, I think that we have the curse of consciousness, which are these unpleasant thoughts.

[00:36:50] Dr. David Hanscom: The gift of consciousness is language, art, spirituality. But if you are fighting off your anxiety and frustration, you can't allow the blessing of consciousness to come to life. So they call it the curse of consciousness. Your fired up brain fires up unpleasant thoughts. And As human beings, we all develop since we use similar strategies for emotional pain than we do for physical pain, which is power and control. We develop these identities that are bulletproof. And so we're a bunch of facades right around planet earth. And these stories cause us to do really terrible things for each other. So it's your facade versus my facade.

[00:37:31] Dr. David Hanscom: We have nations have their identities and powers and whatever. So this need to establish and maintain an identity causes a lot of suffering in the human race. So to me, in a way, this is the next evolution of the human experience is that as we truly understand the driving forces of threat physiology, what makes it worse again is that under threat physiology, your thinking brain gets down regulated.

[00:37:54] Dr. David Hanscom: You can't think clearly. We have domestic abuse. We have nations that are really doing bad things for the nations. I mean, it goes at every level of our being is these physical survival reactions that we're using for emotional survival. so I put a lot of energy into maintaining my facade, perfectionism, self esteem, all these accomplishments, et cetera, but I wasn't connected to me.

[00:38:16] Dr. David Hanscom: I was connected to the facade. So if I didn't know me, how can I know you? So by understanding the driving force. Behind these repetitive unpleasant thoughts that I call ruts is the fired up brain by calming down the brain as things start to change. 

[00:38:35] Christa Biegler: I was going to say, you know, that's the complaint, is that the world is this fired up stress inducing speed machine. Like people are in this kind of vat of stress inducers. And so, you know, how do people come out of that? And I think the answer is consciousness. Is it kind of, but this word has been really, I feel not tangible for sure.

[00:39:01] Dr. David Hanscom: But here's the issue is that's what the process, that's why the doctor is in a sequence. You're going to get the brain back online first. 

[00:39:10] Christa Biegler: Yeah. 

[00:39:10] Dr. David Hanscom: To calm yourself down enough to think. There's a friend of mine in nursing who were called pendulation. Then no matter what phase you're going through, let's say you start to express the writing, and your emotional pain fires up to the point that you can't tolerate it, you stop the writing.

[00:39:26] Dr. David Hanscom: In other words, no matter what phase of the game you're in, you learn to be kind to yourself. We have a little exercise in my group that if somebody irritates you, you take the hit, you don't try to suppress it. And then you mentally silently wish them well, because when you get triggered, it's you, it's not them.

[00:39:43] Dr. David Hanscom: And when you judge somebody badly, you're simply projecting the judgment on yourself onto somebody else. So you can just one of those repetition training things, you can train your brain to be benevolent. So we use the word consciousness is that anytime you're anxious or frustrated, you're reacting to something in the past, you've lost awareness.

[00:40:02] Dr. David Hanscom: So it's a learned skill to train your brain to be connected to the present moment. And it doesn't just happen. So when you use a concept, I want to be conscious. You can't do that. You're using a conscious construct to deal with these survival reactions. So again, once you learn how to develop a working relationship with your massive survival reactions, you can't take them personally because they're universal.

[00:40:27] Dr. David Hanscom: Once you your identity from these survival reactions, then your brain can thrive and grow whatever direction that you wish. And that's what's so exciting about the project I've been working on. And, Bruce and I did four videos together. Bruce Lipsch And he's brilliant. He understands exactly what's going on.

[00:40:49] Dr. David Hanscom: And he wrote the book, Biology of Belief, several decades ago. And I read it initially, and I just sort of go, yeah, fine, whatever. But he's dead on right. Your environment and belief systems actually change your body's chemistry. 

[00:41:04] Christa Biegler: Yeah. 

[00:41:06] Dr. David Hanscom: And so as you learn to change your body's chemistry, then you start opening up and consciousness can evolve.

[00:41:12] Christa Biegler: Yeah. What I want to ask you, and this is the Concern I think people have is do they have to quit their life and their job and move to an island to change their body's chemistry. If some of the external environment is stressful. 

[00:41:28] Dr. David Hanscom: Well, that depends. Okay. So, what a metaphor to use is that I'm a major league baseball player.

[00:41:34] Dr. David Hanscom: So, you're learning skills to process your stress physiology. So, some people are living at home and horrendous circumstances, and it's hard to learn when you're in such adverse circumstances. So I made a choice in which that may not have been the best choice. So avoiding stress becomes a soft stress. So running from stress isn't really the answer.

[00:41:55] Dr. David Hanscom: So eventually, as you become highly skilled at processing stress and keeping your body chemistry in a favorable profile, you can take on anything. Not that you can, you're not suppressing it, you're not being tough, you become flexible and resilient. So the answer is you do not have to do anything different in your life right now.

[00:42:14] Dr. David Hanscom: The reality is though, if you're just learning, is that the stresses may be so overwhelming, you don't have the space in your brain to learn. So the eventual goal is actually if you choose to go to a quieter place, great, but you do it on your terms. You're not doing it because you have to avoid stress.

[00:42:31] Dr. David Hanscom: That being said, the metaphor I like to use is that instead of trying to solve your pain, you're trying to develop skills to simply regulate your physiology. So the metaphor I use is that I'm a major league baseball player, who life is the pitcher, you're the hitter. Remember, the pitcher is not your friend.

[00:42:49] Dr. David Hanscom: Staying alive is not your friend. So the pitcher is trying to make you make an out, and your goal as a hitter is to get on base safely. And so even the best hitters may get out half the time. So there's always day to day, good days, bad days. Some days you're flexible, some days you're not. So it's a very dynamic process that you learn to process adversity more quickly, learn to nurture joy more consistently.

[00:43:14] Dr. David Hanscom: But also remember there's single A, double A, triple A ball in the major leagues. So if you're in a major league stressful situation. But you're only a single a player. Be like me standing up in the batter's box, trying to hit a 90 mile an hour fastball. When I can't even see a 40 mile an hour fastball.

[00:43:33] Dr. David Hanscom: So you had to give yourself a break so you can learn the process and your circumstances. You're in great. You need to take a break, do it. Eventually it doesn't matter what stresses come at you. 

[00:43:46] Christa Biegler: You get better. You get better. You're resilient. 

[00:43:49] Dr. David Hanscom: It's a skill set. 

[00:43:51] Christa Biegler: Yeah. 

[00:43:51] Dr. David Hanscom: So the focus isn't solving your pain because your attention is on the pain.

[00:43:57] Dr. David Hanscom: The goal is simply developing the skills to live life more effectively. 

[00:44:03] Christa Biegler: That's great. So I am going through a journey where I'm collecting, trying to decide on the tools, the nervous system, journey tools that are most effective for clients, right? Because this is the most obnoxious thing for me when the nervous system is dysregulated.

[00:44:19] Christa Biegler: You have mentioned the doc journey, which means I think direct your own care is what that's for, direct your own care. Tell me about how you, This happened over time, even you said you have very different tools, I'm sure, and you've updated. I mean, how do we not stop growing from 4 years ago?

[00:44:36] Christa Biegler: Tell me a little bit about how you told us how you found expressive writing, I think, but tell me how you pull together some of these other tools, more so the how does it, I always love to know behind the scenes a little bit. So tell me how some of these tools came into play into the doc journey.

[00:44:52] Christa Biegler: How did you find them? How did you test, et cetera? Yeah. 

[00:44:56] Dr. David Hanscom: So what happened in 2020? I met Dr. Stephen Porges and his wife, Sue Carter. So he wrote a book called The Polyvagal Theory, and he and his wife, Sue, are just geniuses as far as the autonomic nervous system that regulates the body's response to stresses.

[00:45:12] Dr. David Hanscom: And so it's something we should have been learning in medical school. It just, the clinicians in the group were just flabbergasted, speechless at what we're learning. So the Don Journey course, the Directoral Care Journey course, Is based on the physiology now. So the book I wrote in 2016 is a great book.

[00:45:29] Dr. David Hanscom: It tells you the basic concept of anxiety and anger, but I did not understand the physiology until 2020. So the Donk Journey, I have an app that's based on awareness, hope, forgiveness, and play. Turns out play is the opposite physiological state of threat. And so the, but it's not a distracting play, it's just a sense of play.

[00:45:51] Dr. David Hanscom: So what happens is that the core is essentially the third edition of my book is the Doctrine. So there's a sequence. I just put in some tools in a place to calm things down. Then it explains the principles behind the solution. Then the third step or third leg is about anxiety being a physiological state and how to regulate that.

[00:46:12] Dr. David Hanscom: The fourth one, which is right in the middle, is awareness. Awareness of the environment, of your stories, of your patterns. Then the real healing occurs when you hit anger like five, because again, when you're angry, you can't heal every person that's healed. Hundreds of them have always learned how to process anger.

[00:46:34] Dr. David Hanscom: The sixth step is that we're programmed by our entire life up to this very second. The beauty of the neuroplastic changing brain is that from this second on you can program in anything that you want. So it's all about the whole process of becoming a professional living your life and so it's programming repetition so it becomes automatic.

[00:46:55] Dr. David Hanscom: Then the final step is constructing the life that you want and using the metaphor of building a house. with each room representing part of your life. The kitchen being diet, the family room being social relationships lots of things you can do to create your life. So the problem is we're so used to surviving that we don't know how to create anymore.

[00:47:16] Dr. David Hanscom: So healing occurs in creating the life that you want. If you're going to learn how to speak French, you're not going to learn French by avoiding English. You have to learn French. The default language for the human being is survival. The language that you want to learn is an enjoyable life. And to have an enjoyable life, you actually have to live an enjoyable life.

[00:47:37] Dr. David Hanscom: It takes practice. So you're reprogramming your brain and you're coming out of a fixing solution into a creating mode. So as you create the life that you want, you truly leave the pain circuits behind. People completely heal. I have no symptoms. I don't know. My current challenge is one of nurturing joy.

[00:47:57] Dr. David Hanscom: I'm an obsessive surgeon, so it's been a challenge for me to truly nurture joy, but I'm working on it. My wife might disagree, but I'm working on it. 

[00:48:05] Christa Biegler: We all have our own baseline. 

[00:48:06] Dr. David Hanscom: So the thing is, this isn't work. I mean, it's a fraction of the work it takes of fighting off your physiology. So there's your tool.

[00:48:15] Dr. David Hanscom: So in the sequence is designed to go maybe 15 minutes a day at the most. You don't rush through the course and get fixed. It's like, learn how to play the piano. You learn the scales and practice. Go to the next step. So, the doctrine is a sequence that allows you to heal at your own pace.

[00:48:30] Dr. David Hanscom: Again, I recommend no more than 15 to 20 minutes a day at the most. And once you get to certain, there's a little rest stops between each leg. It's intended to actually implement and practice the tools that you just learned. People say, well, I read my book, they read Back and Control and I still hurt.

[00:48:46] Dr. David Hanscom: Well, of course. If I can read a piano book, I'm not going to play the piano. Right. You're basically becoming a professional at living your life. Why not? Now, I just have to rant for a second. I mean, actually, these are skills you should have been taught in elementary school.

[00:49:02] Christa Biegler: Yeah. 

[00:49:03] Dr. David Hanscom: None of these are very hard.

[00:49:05] Christa Biegler: Yeah, I think that's a perfect I'm not saying ending point, but you just mentioned these are skills to learn in elementary school. And as a parent, something that has distressed me with awareness of it is that everyone is perceiving their experiences. Every child, grows up with whatever experience and we all have things to process.

[00:49:27] Christa Biegler: What advice do you have to parents for facilitating consciousness, joy, et cetera, in childhood, so we can start to teach these skills. 

[00:49:39] Dr. David Hanscom: So I have this conversation with parents all the time. So people, so what can I do to help my kid? So if you to do this, and this, the number one answer is let go.

[00:49:52] Dr. David Hanscom: Nobody likes to be told what to do, especially your kids. Number one. Say while your kid, not going to be less stressed than the parents. So it's like, if you want your kids to heal and thrive, you have to do it yourself. So I always recommend, so the last two years of my practice, by the way, were almost exclusively with family units, because the family is a huge factor in keeping people in pain.

[00:50:12] Dr. David Hanscom: They're also a huge factor in keeping people out of, pulling people out of pain. So I say, look, if you want your kids to heal, your kid's not going to be less stressed than you are. So I really highly recommend that the parents individually, but as, but both parents, if they're in the household, go through the process themselves for six weeks, 12 weeks.

[00:50:34] Dr. David Hanscom: And then start manifesting the changes they want to see in their children. There's a process called mirror neurons that if somebody yawns, people start to yawn, somebody laughs, people start to laugh. It's not psychological, you're actually stimulating that part of the brain. So if you want your child to relax, then just relax yourself, develop an attitude of play or playfulness.

[00:50:55] Dr. David Hanscom: And your kids will change, but you're not doing as a manipulative tool, maybe they change, maybe they don't. So it's a process of learning the tools yourself, actually manifesting what you're learning in your family. Create a place of, I mean, everybody wants to feel safe, especially your children. So if you're coming home and laughing and getting along with each other.

[00:51:19] Dr. David Hanscom: It makes a difference. That's huge. We also have one rule we worked on, which is really challenging is that you have to build an absolute safe house in your house. In other words, if you get into an argument or fight, it doesn't matter which people in the house do it. It goes outside your house has to be an absolute sanctuary.

[00:51:37] Dr. David Hanscom: You can relax and know it's going to be safe. So a lot of structure, not a lot of psychology, family meetings. Directives rules that are not rules, but more agreements about how to get along with each other. Anyways, a mass amount of things that can be done in the family situation, but the parents themselves have to manifest it themselves.

[00:51:58] Dr. David Hanscom: They cannot expect the kids to be less stressed than they are. 

[00:52:01] Christa Biegler: Yeah, I think anytime I ask a question like that of a guest, they give a similar answer, but yours was very tangible. Some very good snippets there. And thanks for mentioning mirror neurons as well, because it's such a thing we can understand, right?

[00:52:17] Christa Biegler: We've all experienced it. 

[00:52:19] Dr. David Hanscom: Well, it goes a little further because the groups I'm working with right now, is parents blame the kids for being disruptive. It's the other way, it's absolutely the other way around. It's the parents act the way they are that actually causes the kids to be disruptive.

[00:52:35] Christa Biegler: Say more. 

[00:52:36] Dr. David Hanscom: It's completely backwards. 

[00:52:37] Christa Biegler: What do parents do that creates kids to be disruptive? 

[00:52:41] Dr. David Hanscom: They bring the troubles at home. They come in a bad mood. I have a one rule, one harsh rule or hard rule that do not walk in the front door if you're angry. If you're having a bad day at work, don't walk in the door.

[00:52:53] Dr. David Hanscom: So what you want to do is be a source of peace, love and joy. Of course, parents argue with each other. If you're going to argue, take it outside. There's so many things you can do, but people are stressed, and they somehow think home is the place to bring it to, and it should be the opposite.

[00:53:09] Dr. David Hanscom: You want your home to be a place you can actually regenerate. You don't want it to be a place to solve your problems. If you can't have a place at home that you can create that's safe, Where are you going to create safety? So most people, including myself, and again, I'm guilty as charged. We still look at a place to just quote, take it out on people, do our thing, vent, whatever it is.

[00:53:32] Dr. David Hanscom: That's the last place you should ever vent or take things out on people is your family. Never. There's never an excuse to actually take out your frustrations on any family member. You're just doing damage. 

[00:53:43] Christa Biegler: Such good sentiments to end with. Dr. Hanscom, I always enjoy our conversations.

[00:53:49] Christa Biegler: Where would you like people to find you online? 

[00:53:52] Dr. David Hanscom: So I do have a source center website called backincontrol. com, one word, backincontrol. com. Then there's a resources page that I think I sent you that links to everything that I do. So we have the DLC Journey app, which is a little bit more playful and interactive.

[00:54:09] Dr. David Hanscom: My wife and stepdaughter put that together. And the Dr. D course is a bit more detailed and more systematic. I coach twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There's also links to Psychology Today which now has over 1. 3 million views on it about anxiety being another name for pain. So my book is Back in Control.

[00:54:29] Dr. David Hanscom: I have a book on spine surgery. The current book I'm writing is on ruts, which I think will be the biggest thing I'll ever contribute in my lifetime. I mean, I can't tell you how much people suffer from these repetitive unpleasant thoughts. Again, they're considered unsolvable by the mental health profession and they're completely solvable.

[00:54:46] Dr. David Hanscom: They're just solvable. And I can tell you dozens of stories already of people that are coming out of it very quickly. We learn not to take your physiology personally, it's just game on. So I'm super excited about this new book. I think I'm going to call it transcending the curse of consciousness ruts.

[00:55:05] Christa Biegler: Are they coming out of ruts because they're working on through the linear tools?

[00:55:11] Dr. David Hanscom: See, we try to control our thoughts. You cannot control your thoughts in any way, shape, or form. So, again, as you calm down the physiology, it's like that hornet's nest. You quit shaking the hornet's nest, the thoughts keep coming up.

[00:55:23] Dr. David Hanscom: You calm down the thoughts dramatically. So, again, I had as bad of intrusive thoughts as you could ever imagine. They are gone. Simply gone. I have a friend of mine who's a professional who has severe... Intrusive thoughts for 15 years, full blown OCD. And in three months, he has no OCD. It's just gone.

[00:55:45] Christa Biegler: Well, what I have to ask this, cause people are going to want to know, well, how do you, cause I would say there would be a lot of people that would argue with you on, can you change your thoughts? 

[00:55:54] Dr. David Hanscom: You cannot change your thoughts. You can calm down your physiology and the thoughts do what they're And as you comment on the physiology, remember that the reason for the thoughts is you create this ego and story to make yourself feel better about these horrible survival sensations.

[00:56:11] Dr. David Hanscom: And once you learn how to develop a working relationship with those and quit reacting to them and quit taking them personally, you don't need the thoughts. Your ego really does disappear. When you move your brain into creativity and play, that's a long, you're moving a long ways away from these thoughts.

[00:56:27] Dr. David Hanscom: So as you put your brain towards creativity, mind spins a lot, but it's on creative things. How do I solve this? What do I do here? Where can I go next? My brain's not ruminating on things I can't control. So I cannot control negative thoughts. None of us can. And it's considered unsolvable in the mental health profession, but again, they put anxiety and anger in a psychological bucket instead of it being this massive physiological state.

[00:56:55] Dr. David Hanscom: So that's the whole key with dynamic healing, that you learn how to calm down your physiology through how you process input. How you create flexibility in your nervous system. How you directly regulate the body's physiology. Again, we call it dynamic healing. So again, the people go through the dog journey, actually have a dramatic decrease in your repetitive unpleasant thoughts.

[00:57:17] Dr. David Hanscom: It only hit me about six weeks ago. I mean, I just had this massive explosion in my head about all this stuff coming together over 20 years of actually 30 years of searching for an answer for my own. obsessive thought patterns and it hit me hard. I was, swore I would never write another book.

[00:57:34] Dr. David Hanscom: It's just too hard to do, but I'm pretty compelled to write. I've sent the parts of the drafts out to people already who are just super excited about it actually coming around very quickly. Once you understand that you cannot control your thoughts in any way, shape or form, you learn to separate from them.

[00:57:50] Dr. David Hanscom: But as you learn to calm your body down, It just goes away. It's not work. It's much less work than trying to fight these things all the time. 

[00:58:02] Christa Biegler: Yeah, I think, there's a expression called doing the work. And I think one of the challenges is that it feels ambiguous to people. And I think sometimes people have gone through this.

[00:58:12] Christa Biegler: They've done different things for their nervous system and it's calmed their physiology, but maybe they couldn't put their finger on some of the things, you know, it can look different. There's a lot of modalities, right. To calm the nervous system. 

[00:58:22] Dr. David Hanscom: Well, this gets tricky. I'm going to try this. Let me try this one and see what happens.

[00:58:26] Christa Biegler: Perfect. 

[00:58:27] Dr. David Hanscom: So One of my friends point out very succinctly when you read self help books You spend too much time even on my stuff the Doctrine or you try this find mindfulness. Let's try better diet Let's try actually let's just try all these different things You're actually reinforcing threat physiology.

[00:58:42] Dr. David Hanscom: You're trying to fix it. So, again, going to the Major League Baseball players, you're developing a skill set to live life more efficiently and more professionally. So, again, you learn how to regulate your physiology more effectively. You learn how to nurture joy. They're two separate skill sets. The key issue is never one thing that solves a problem.

[00:59:07] Dr. David Hanscom: It's an overall competency about how you do it. Like a golf swing. I have the worst golf swing in the world. I don't play golf very well, but some of the best golfers in the world have terrible golf swings. They do it their way. But they practice practice and became proficient at it. So again, reading my book, doing my courses, not going to change anything.

[00:59:24] Dr. David Hanscom: The question is, are you wanting to learn the skills to actually regulate your physiology and how to nurture joy? So you're learning skills. Thank you. You're not trying to fix your pain. So again, when you're jumping from treatment to treatment. To fix your pain, you're actually reinforcing threat physiology.

[00:59:43] Christa Biegler: Yeah. 

[00:59:44] Christa Biegler: And I think trying to control things in general is a huge reinforcement of threat physiology. So when you say, when you reprogram, Oh, we're actually not trying to fix. We're actually trying to learn skills to regulate physiology and nurture joy. It takes away the pressure perhaps to perform to perfect.

[01:00:03] Christa Biegler: To achieve. These are all things for us that we all struggle with, right?

[01:00:07] Dr. David Hanscom: Let me ask you a question. Why are we doing all that in the first place?

[01:00:11] Christa Biegler: That is a great question. Why are we being a perfectionist? Why are we wanting to achieve? What are we trying to prove? 

[01:00:19] Christa Biegler: I don't know. 

[01:00:19] Dr. David Hanscom: Because remember one of the initial steps is you separate your identity from your survivor reactions.

[01:00:24] Dr. David Hanscom: That's one of the biggest steps is that you do not have to take the survivor personally because 100 percent they are a gift of life. And so as you separate from, it's what you have, it's not who you are. So you learn about this, work your relationship with it, allow you to co exist with your survivor reactions, and things change dramatically because you're not fighting it.

[01:00:47] Dr. David Hanscom: They have the energy to be creative. Let me try another metaphor, see how this resonates with you. we're all familiar with artificial intelligence, and I'm not an expert at all, but I was taught that, the computers that play chess is basically artificial intelligence. So the way a computer becomes skilled to beat a chess master is that you have to put the right rules into the computer and it has to be taught how to play chess by a chess master in order to become a master that beats the master.

[01:01:18] Dr. David Hanscom: So you have to put in good data and you have to have a good processing system. If you have the rules in there, which you teach on my chess skills, which are very limited, The computer is never going to be good enough to actually, you know, beat the master. You have to put in a good database. So the human brain is very similar.

[01:01:36] Dr. David Hanscom: Is that we're programmed our entire life. The data that gets loaded in our computers isn't great. For a lot of us, especially with childhood trauma. That we don't have a processing system that works correctly. So we have bad data and bad processing system. As a human race, we're sort of screwed. So what you're doing with the principles of the dog journey or similar to concepts is you're choosing to put in better data, i. e. for instance not discussing your pain or complaining, that's better data. And you learn how to process it differently. You have a different processing system. 

[01:02:10] Dr. David Hanscom: So what's exciting is that we're programmed by every second of our life up to this very second right now. So there's no such thing as an authentic self.

[01:02:18] Dr. David Hanscom: We're actually programmed by who everybody else thinks we should be. So who are we? So the beauty of that is from this second on, this very second on, you can program in anything that you want. Anything. The brain is incredibly neuroplastic. So they're trying to fix the problem, which reinforces the problem.

[01:02:38] Dr. David Hanscom: You can program who you choose to be. Now, again, you have to process stress physiology. So you actually get your vision back about who you want to be, but getting your vision, the sense of play, connecting with what you want is actually how people heal. So again, this is a creating process. But with the incredible neuroplasticity of the brain, people not only heal, they really heal.

[01:03:03] Dr. David Hanscom: It's unbelievable how, I mean, their entire body transforms, and once you hit a certain tipping point, you keep going that other direction. But remember with the human psyche, people do not tolerate mental pain. So I'm asking you to give up your physical pain so you can feel more mental pain. That's not going to work.

[01:03:20] Dr. David Hanscom: Right. So as you learn to teach people how to tolerate the mental pain and open the door a little bit at a time, that's why you have the sequence that we do, is that you learn to tolerate the mental pain pretty soon. It's not a big deal. Pretty soon you start thriving going forward. So you learn how to process physical pain and mental pain, and then you just keep creating.

[01:03:40] Dr. David Hanscom: So again, it's like learning a new language. You're creating a new life. So it's that creativity that actually solves the problem. So what we did know in the medical school is the brain is incredibly neuroplastic. You can create anything that you want. You can program into whatever you want. It's that repetition that allows you to heal.

[01:03:59] Christa Biegler: Well, I always love a lot of good analogies. There is a skill to being able to make kind of this mental mush into something that is tangible. I think people knowing there's the levels of not knowing that this is a problem, knowing it's a problem, but not being able to do anything with it and then making tangible changes to reprogram, creating, processing, and changing things. 

[01:04:26] Christa Biegler: Dr. David Hanscom, thank you for coming back. And I look forward to the, I know the book will be a little bit of a journey. It might be the easiest one you've written yet. Might just happen so quickly. And then maybe there's even another conversation after you get to see it all come to life.

[01:04:42] Dr. David Hanscom: It's about three fourths done. I mean, it's all in my head. 

[01:04:45] Christa Biegler: Six weeks, three fourths done. 

[01:04:46] Christa Biegler: No problem. 

[01:04:47] Dr. David Hanscom: Yeah, it's almost done. So I'm not super excited. I guess my frustration, life keeps coming out and so I don't have time to finish it. But no, I'm going on this trip for three weeks. I'm taking on, taking off and going to finish the book in the next three weeks.

[01:04:58] Dr. David Hanscom: So I'm pretty excited about it. 

[01:05:00] Christa Biegler: Well, back in control. com, you can find all the resources and the other websites from there. We'll have that in the show notes. Thanks again for coming on today. 

[01:05:09] Dr. David Hanscom: Thank you. I enjoyed it.

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