How it works
60 to 80% of what brings people into primary care is stress-related. The primary axis of stress-related issues is the Autonomic Nervous System. You can also think of this as your ‘automatic’ nervous system, e.g., the parts of your nervous system that you don’t have to think about running. The Autonomic Nervous System is the neural architecture of the mindbody connection.
An autonomic state is like a tuning preset on your deep nervous system. It shifts the master controls on your nervous system to respond to different levels of safety or threat.
In our modern lives, there are so many threats around us: to our physical safety, our emotional safety, our sense of identity, our sense of what is right, our financial safety. These threats can happen with people we know or don't know, at work or home or anywhere, or just checking an email.
When we feel unsafe, we might feel in danger, or under lifethreat. When this happens, our autonomic nervous systems re-tune based on how our bodies interpret these threats.
When our bodies detect threat, they change the volume on our internal and relational worlds. They do this to help us survive, but then often modern people don't know how to shift back into safety and connection.
Our stress responses were designed, biologically, to come on rapidly and turn off rapidly. But in our modern world, where stress doesn't go away, often these responses don't turn off. When they don't turn off we become ill in ways that depend on the specific type of threat response activated.
If we move into the biology of defense, we can find ourselves stuck in non-resolving states of accommodation or appeasing, flight, fight, freeze, or shutdown.
These defensive autonomic states undergird anxiety, auto-immune issues, complex chronic illness, depression, gastro-intestinal disease, heart issues, sleep disorders, post-traumatic stress injuries, and other physical and psychological conditions.
While these issues get compartmentalized in healthcare, and treated by different specialists, all are the result of characteristic deflections of the Autonomic Nervous System into the biology of defense.
Sometimes, as is often the case in childhood adversity and complex chronic illness, these deflections into defense took place decades ago, and like trees growing around a rock we have been forced to twist around them.
Yet when these deflections are clearly diagnosed, and addressed at their roots, we can often guide the ANS back to a state of safety and connection, where these issues often resolve.
We are world-leading experts in the neurobiology of connection, and in diagnosing and treating stress-related disorders. Our Founder was asked to teach our model to the entire faculty of the Stanford University Medical School, two divisions of the UN, inside of NATO, to the innovation unit of one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, and to clinics and wellness practitioners around the world.
Clinicians in 50 countries use the software, books, and posters that we have developed. His article about the nervous system in Psychology Today has been read more than 30,000 times.
We may be able to help you find a path home.