The Biology of Threat and Survival

Yeah, absolutely. The metabolism is forever changing and adapting to your environment, Right. So let's say somebody gets super stressed out. That's going to cause downstream issues. Right. You're going to get your peepers are going to dilate. You're going to get tachycardia. You're going to your bronchial tubes are going to open up. There's a lot of things that happen. Right. So when we look at the cell, everything, everything is based on do I feel safe and secure or do I feel threatened? Okay. So in a, in a, in a contemporary, in a historical physical threat situation, you know, a lion jumps out at you, you go, Oh shit. And you either, you've got time to run. Well, yeah, you've got four options. You're going to fight, flight, freeze a facade, right? So traditionally we look at fight or flight. You're either going to try to fight them or you're going to run away. So in that situation, things like your immune system gets jacked up, which creates a lot of inflammation. Stress levels go up. You lose heart rate variability. And then you start really preferentially utilizing glucose for energy because glucose makes really fast energy. Then when you get away, all that stuff goes down. Unfortunately, now we have contemporary social issues. So you have what's called conserved transcriptional response to adversity. So if you are put in a position where you feel threatened, that can have influences on your genome, which then creates transcriptional responses where you're making an inappropriate amount of inflammatory chemicals. And when you do that, you're shoving, shoving, shoving glucose into the cell. When you overload the mitochondria with glucose or with free fatty acids, that creates a lot of free radical damage. So in order for the body to protect yourself, it starts to shut down the mitochondria. then pyruvate can't get into the mitochondria. It gets kicked out as lactate. Then eventually the cell says, okay, how do I fix this? Let's prevent glucose from getting into the cell. Now your glucose starts to rise. Then it says, okay, well, I'm also getting energy from free fatty acids. How do I prevent that? Well, let's direct free fatty acids to other pathways. Now your cholesterol starts to rise. Your LDL rises. Your triglycerides start to rise. Then you have somebody whose biochemistry labs are really fucked up. and then you go talk to somebody you go talk to a doctor and how i've got a pill for that you go talk to a trainer he goes oh doctors are stupid i got a pill for that but they're not actually addressing the problem which is if we can get them to calm the fuck down a lot of that stuff will go away yep but in and of themselves all of those markers say the blood markers and everything they're not the problem they're responses directly to the problem and no one's actually addressing it it's like taking the check engine bulb out of the check engine light not addressing the problem in the engine, right? Yeah, 100%. And let's say I pull that bulb out, right? I pull the fuse out. I don have to now or I put a piece of masking tape over so I don have to see that light Well eventually what going to happen Your fucking engine going to blow You going to rot inside yeah So you can ignore symptoms but you also can just treat the symptoms If you, what you want to do is look at what the higher order thing is that's causing those downstream issues and start working on that. And more often than not, it's in the brain. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.