Reset Your Nervous System And Support Healing

Introduction and Speaker Background 0:00

Welcome back to the reverse Autoimmune Disease Summit. Healing your energy body. I'm Doctor Kisha yours. And I'm really delighted to bring you a colleague who is doing some great work in the world of healing your energy body. Alex Howard is founder and chairman of the Optimum Health Clinic, one of the world's leading integrative medicine clinic specializing in fatigue. He's published academic research and publications such as the British Medical Journal, Open in Psychology and Health, and is the author of Why Me?

My Journey from Him in Me to Health and Happiness and Decode Your Fatigue, a clinically proven 12 step plan to increase your energy, heal your body, and transform your life. Alex is creator of the Therapeutic Coaching methodology. And since March of 2020, has been documenting his therapeutic work with real life patients via his In Therapy with Alex Howard YouTube series. In the last few years, he's created some of the largest online conferences in the health mind body markets, including the Fatigue Super Conference and the Trauma Super Conference.

Welcome to the summit, Alex. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here. So always I start off these interviews with asking how you came to specialize and what you do in the world these days. We all have a story and I would love to hear yours and have you share it with our audience. Well, I think like a lot of people, this wasn't my original, like, flat. I think my, my parents aspiration was probably that I've become an accountant, and my aspiration was to become a rockstar, and we both.

I was I found myself, around the time my turned 16 years old, suffering from quite suddenly, quite severely debilitating fatigue symptoms and wellness. And like of course, anyone in that situation went and saw my general practitioner, general physician and was told, you probably have a virus. This may take a month or two. And, you know, and at the time it was it was super frustrating. I just finished a big set of exams that you do when you're 16 here in the UK, and I had all kinds of ambitions of things that I wanted to do that summer, and I spent pretty much the whole summer in bed resting, and a few months became a few more months.

And I went back to the doctor and my grandmother, who, knew more than I did, ended up saying, do you think this could be me or chronic fatigue syndrome? And I was told it, it may be. And it may be six months to get back to, to to recovery. And I remember at the time, six months sounded like a life sentence or six months ended up being a seven year journey. And the first couple of years of that was being dragged around to see various experts. Some medical, some non-medical, some genius, some crazy, some I wasn't quite sure which they were, but there wasn't really any fundamental answers.

And as probably we'll get into in this conversation, I wasn't anxious. It wasn't that the anxiety, depression and overwhelming my nervous system necessarily was the cause of the symptoms I was experiencing. But the symptoms I was experiencing was certainly causing those things. Because when you don't know what's wrong with you, why it's wrong with you, there's no therefore, pathway to treatment. You don't know if you should rest or you try and push through and then you become even more severely, depleted through doing that in of itself is a highly, nervous system, dysregulated experience to, to go through and after a couple of years,

Alex Howardu2019s Illness Journey and Recovery 4:10

I basically reached the point that it wasn't so much that I was actively suicidal. It was just I couldn't see a way of continue doing my life the way that it was. And to cut a long story short, I had a conversation with with my uncle, which basically went along the lines of, if you want the circumstances of your life to be different, you could wait another two years, you could wait 20 years, and the chances are they won't change. Or you can become captain of the ship of your own healing journey and become proactive.

Become the person which is doing everything you can to turn around the situation you're in. And so for the next five years, I read hundreds of books. I saw, I think, 35 different practitioners. One point I was taking, I think it was 70 supplements a day, not something I'd recommend. I was doing everything I possibly could. I was, you know, I was meditating every day. I was doing yoga, I was doing psychological work, and there was no one answer. It wasn't like, I, I wish I could sit here and say, I found the answer.

And and ideally, I've patented it and this I it it's become what I found was and I put it in a bottle and I can tell it to you exactly. My counselor would be much happier. Right, than what I, what I found was that recovery from chronic illness, particularly fatigue related conditions. But I think it's also true of autoimmune conditions. I think it's also true of many, many conditions is it's like a puzzle and we have to find the different pieces. If it's a jigsaw, the different pieces to that jigsaw, and which is why I ended up calling the book that I writes around recovering from fatigue, decoding or fatigue.

Because to be able to map the path to recovery, we first have to map the different factors and variables that cause someone to become ill in the first place. And so after going on this journey, finding the different pieces to decode my fatigue and recover, I, I. Then I realized I wasn't going to become the rock star that I wanted to be, and accountancy definitely wasn't something that was appealing. I'd studied psychology at university, and ultimately I set up the clinic nearly 20 years ago now, which was the organization that I'd wanted to exist in the years that I'd been ill.

And the optimum Health Clinic now has 25 full time practitioners, patients in over 50 countries around the world, and doesn't have all the answers. But we've certainly found a lot of pieces of the jigsaw. And I think what we do particularly well is help people map the pathways and the elements that have caused them to become unwell, and using that then to map and build pathways towards recovery. That's, we are definitely in alignment. The name of my first book was Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle. There you go.

Yeah. There's not one answer that got you there, and there's not one answer that gets you out in terms of you write the same thing for every single person. And so, mapping your own individual puzzle is such an important, probably the exercise of life. Right? Yeah. And journalists hate me for it because they say, great. Can you give me a couple of soundbites? Exactly. Really? No. Yeah, I can, I can give you a really long, nuanced, complicated answer that's going to make your readers really nuts. Already very excited.

But the that my thing has always been to to be a truth seeker and to focus on what's true, not what's convenient and, and you know, to to feed into that that we'll talk, I'm sure, around the role of our mind and our emotions in, in physical conditions, particularly in I mean, conditions. And one of the few things that would have given me a rush of energy in the years that I had no energy, was somebody telling me that my physical symptoms were caused by my mind? Because what it would have felt like was that someone fundamentally misunderstood the lived experience that I was having.

And often the time we most want to be sane and we most want to be supported by the people around us. If what we feel is we're being judged or we're being told that we're making up what's happening for us. And I think the distinction that's really important to make is that a physical reality can be impacted by our minds and our emotions, doesn't mean we're making it up. It doesn't mean they're not real physical symptoms. It doesn't mean there's not measurable, real biological change of what's happening in our body.

And it also doesn't mean that our mind and our emotions are the only piece of that puzzle, or the only piece of that jigsaw. And the reality is, as we can get into, there's a lot of evidence and research that demonstrates that when on nervous system is dysregulated, it impacts our body. And when we calm that dysregulation, it impacts our healing. You know, 10,000 years ago, I or Vedic medicine, the sister science of yoga, said that the body is the canvas of the mind, you know, and and I think that's such a simple, very elegant way of saying that in this idea that we keep creating mind body complex, like the separation that we're trying to put back together, it doesn't even like it's a paradigm that doesn't even exist.

They are not separate. And so, you know, so you're telling me I'm just making this up. It's like, well, you know, that's that's inside that same paradigm of here, here's your mind and and here's your body. Right? They they emerge together. So this is such an important, conversation to be having. So how does your nervous system affect the immune system? Well, let's let's talk about a few of the studies that have been done just to look at it from a research point of view. And then let's look at it from a more layman's terms, like what are some of the actual mechanisms and things that are actually happening.

So a lot of the original research on second year immunology, which is really the impact of our mind on our nervous system and our immune system and our body is been done on students at exam time, which is for the very simple reason that there's lots of students in universities and lots of research happens in universities. So a lot of the recruitment in studies tends to happen with with students. And there's there's been a whole, there's been tons and tons and tons of these studies. One of the original ones was back in 1986, which was published in the General Journal of Behavioral Medicine, and they took blood samples from 34 medical students a month before exams and on the second day of exam starting.

And it's no surprise on the day of examinations, because, by the way, anyone that's been to university members ever gets an exam time on the day of examinations, the day after significant decline in multiple measures in the immune system, particularly natural killer cells, which is the part of our immune system which is effectively responding to to threats and invasion. And so we can just say on a very simple level, looking at of that, when nervous system is dysregulated and when we're in under state of stress, it's impacting the nervous impacting on the immune system.

We can then one of my, I think one of the most interesting studies, because I think it brings a lot more elements together, was a study back in 2012, in immunology and allergy clinics in North America. They did, punch biopsies like muscle biopsies on people, the 3.5mm biopsy on the forearm of people. And they looked at 13 women in a control group and 13 women who were, caregivers of, relatives who had Alzheimer's or dementia. So obviously, in a situation where there's a lot of ongoing stress, those in the caregiving roles, those muscle biopsies took 24% longer to heal than the control group.

So what we can see is when we're under stress, our body's ability to heal is directly impacted.

How Stress Affects the Immune System 12:40

What does all this mean in terms of autoimmune conditions? Well, another way of looking at this is to put it in more kind of layman's terms. Example I remember on the London Underground pre the bombings in the terrorist bombings back in 2007. So was that 15 or so years ago. And people would regularly, you know, people would forget their, you know, their gym bag or they'd leave a kind of shopping or whatever on the underground because they forgot about it. And people go, oh, someone's left that bag or whatever.

After the bombings, the the level of alert in London was like super, amplified. Everyone's constantly understandably terrified there's going to be another bomb that's going to be left on a bus or on the London Underground or whatever. So the whole network kept being shut down over these really small things of like someone forgetting their tennis shoes on, on the, on the northern line, for example, because the, the hyper alert means that the system is, is responding in a hypersensitive way to things that are actually not a threat and not a danger.

So we know what's happening in our nervous system is impacting our immune system. The example I gave around exam times, that's an acute short term stress. That's something that super stressful for a period of time. And then that stress goes away. The real challenge is when we start to live in states of chronic stress, when a nervous system normalizes to being in a state of dysregulation. Now why may that be? Well, if you think about one of the the, the brilliant sets of the human body is we have all of these different homeostatic balances.

We have these these very, sometimes narrow ranges of reference within which parts of our system learn to have their state of balance. So that could be anything from blood sugar to blood pressure to blood temperature to circadian rhythms to hormone levels. And what what helps our system to function in a consistent way is to learn what is normal, what is a baseline, and then to work to keep the system at that level. If we have stress of exams, we're super stressed and then the exams are finished and we calm down again.

But when we live in a state of chronic, ongoing stress, now that may be something like we're in a super stressful job that doesn't end. We might be in an abusive relationship, we might have ongoing financial stress. It might just be that from the minute we wake up, the minute we go to bed, we're in a constant state of being on in our system. Maybe that's triggered by trauma, and our response to that trauma is to be in a constantly busy and unavoidable state. But the impact of that is we train on nervous system to be in a state of what I call a maladaptive stress response.

So a healthy stress response exams get stressed, it's over. Or you and I are walking down the street in London. We're not paying attention. We don't see the big right London bus thundering down the street towards us. We both get a big hit of adrenaline. Corso. We leap onto the pavement or sidewalk to escape the bus, and then we know we're safe and our system calms down. Thousands of years ago, that might have been a sabertooth tiger that was chasing us. But those short term stress is our system is used to.

It's when we live in a state of chronic, ongoing stress that our nervous system gets. The new homeostatic balance becomes a maladaptive stress response. Now, our response to stress is not a healthy response. We've become maladaptive. We've learned to live in that heightened state of arousal. What that then means is it's not just on nervous system that's impacted. It's all of our bodily systems that are impacted. So our digestion is often impacted. Heart rate often is impacted, but particularly our immune system is impacted.

And so one of the things that we see a lot, you know, any one time we have about a thousand, patients with, chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or any that we're working with at the clinic. One of the things that we see fairly consistently is when someone has this maladaptive stress response, their immune system starts to respond in maladaptive ways. People can have, sensitivities, for example, multiple chemical sensitivities. They can start to have sensitivities to chemicals that, are not what other people might experience.

They can have food sensitivities that other people might not experience. They can have autoimmune conditions where the system is effectively in overdrive and attacking itself, because that is the program of the nervous system being in that dysregulated state. And so there's lots of different frames of ways that we can look at this. But fundamentally, if our system and we can maybe talk about why this might happen, but if our system has learned to be in a maladaptive stress response, it is therefore directly impacting upon auto immune conditions.

You know, in the the study that I did called the Healing Unresolved Trauma Study back in 2013, I have two places where from initial trauma we bifurcate in adulthood to maladaptive stress responses, which is how we've done it always, you know, which leads to disease. And then adaptive, processing. And in the middle of each of those circles, in the maladaptive one, there's an unwillingness to self confront. And then the other one, there's a willingness to self confront. And so I think the call here is to be willing to, to curiously and compassionately ask the right questions.

Right. Yeah. To drop into that space of. All right. So what is it? I always think the human body, it has the, the job that has the least gratitude shown toward it and the entire existence on the planet was like 99% of things perfectly. But it gets no gratitude. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, we wake up in the morning with the the miracle of sight and then get up and say, how come I, I'm tired, you know, and so it's, it's pretty interesting the, the way that I think this journey goes is, you know, with that curious, compassionate inquiry that, that also appreciate, includes appreciation and gratitude.

Right. And which ultimately relaxes that nervous system. I it it draws it out of hyper vigilance into this, oh collaborative alliance between all the parts instead of combative, which is where you're right, the illness is a combative relationship with self. Yeah. You know, I think a big part of this is the we learn these responses in often as coping and survival strategies in various ways in our lives. But then we normalize to them and, and then we normalize to them. And then we, we become resentful towards them because we recognize them as we see them as the architects of the problem or the suffering.

And so often what can happen is when people start to understand the relationship between the nervous system and their immune system and, and the rest of their bodily systems, it's like, oh, it's the fault of my nervous system. And then it becomes like, almost like a fight to get that nervous system to shift. But one of the ways that I think doesn't work very well, by the way, it doesn't work very well. I know. And but part of the antidote to it, I think, is to to actually see it in the lens of the brilliance of, of our system.

Right. But I often we found ourselves in situations and circumstances where a dysregulated nervous system was not only the only choice available to us, but it was also the best choice available to us because the wise mind of the child figuring out how to survive did a great job, right? It's like one of the ways that I talk about, emotional defense is that we often build we build walls to protect us. Emotional walls protect us. And there's a brilliance because they protect us and we survive. But the problem is, the walls that protect us also imprison us.

And so they might keep the wild out, but they also keep us trapped in. That doesn't mean that the wall is wrong. It just means that it's not necessary in every situation. And it might be that we go and spend some time around people that were quite toxic to be around 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. And they may be that way now. And constructing that wall may be an appropriate defense in that, in that moment.

Trauma, Perception, and Nervous System Patterns 22:00

But it's being able to, in a sense, develop the flexibility to be able to respond in a way that's appropriate to the situation that we find ourselves in. And so that's why I particularly like talking about it as a maladaptive stress response. It's not that a stress response is wrong. A stress response saves our life numerous times in our lives. It's the fact that it becomes maladaptive and then is, as you were touching on, it's meeting that from a place of real interest and curiosity of I wonder why my system has lunch respond in these ways?

Well, what was the brilliance in that? And recognizing that? Is it necessary now? And what do I need to learn to do to be able to construct and train myself to have more appropriate ways to respond? Ultimately, what this boils down to in in Buddhist thought, there's this understanding that it there's 17 different steps to perceiving any piece of information. So when I know that you mean not just I'm right and you're wrong, it is right that often when I know that your walls are green. I've gone through 17 different steps to get to green, you know, and in my perceptual field of I mind, you know, and, and so it's, it's a really fascinating way of mapping in how we bring in information, synthesize it, and then how we then trigger our nervous system from that perception and that perceiving.

And they, they document that in that 17 steps, there's a midway point. They call it the doorway to karma. And they're saying, however you've always done it is how you're going to do it forever more, unless you can open that little gap over. So wider, right, and, and start to perhaps perceive differently. And so ultimately I think what gets lost a lot in the vagal nerve stimulation and nervous system retraining and, you know, all of the things that, methodologies and tools and technologies is this really basic understanding that our pattern of perceiving is what sets the whole thing off, right?

That's what sets our adrenals off. That's what releases cortisol, the cortisol that breaks down the gut wall. The, you know, like the whole thing happens really right here first. And, you know, the habit of how we perceive is ultimately the cure to all of this. Yeah. Well, it's you know, I a lot of my work these days is around, understanding mapping and working with trauma. And I think one of the things that people often don't realize are trauma is it's not actually the events that cause trauma, right?

The events might be unpleasant and might be very difficult experiences, but you can have ten different people go through the same event and have different experiences of that event. The resources that we have to meet that event, and the resources of the people around us to meet that event, has a very big impact in terms of what, of what the impact is in a sense. So if our, core emotional needs are being met. So, for example, the need for boundaries to be able to say, yes, that's okay. No, that's not okay.

The the emotional need to have an inner sense of safety, which is a young child, is going to need to be through career regulation with people around us as a, as a as we get older, we learn to hopefully co regulate for ourselves or self-regulate. I'm nervous system the need to feel loved and held and emotionally nourished by the people around us so we can go through a difficult experience, have those needs met and it won't necessarily have the same impact as it would for somebody else, even if the experience was a very unpleasant experience.

Because then how does that impact our nervous system? Because if we don't get those needs met, the trauma happened. The the thing that's causing suffering in our lives now is not the thing that happened decades ago. It's how our nervous system has been patterned and trained as a result of that experience, which is now perpetuates a cycle of suffering in our lives. But the thing that really causes the issue is the habits and behaviors that we create to try and deal with this dysregulation in our nervous system and those core emotional needs that weren't met.

And so, for example, we start to develop ways of being in our life that if, for example, we didn't have those boundaries, we weren't taught to be able to have our yes or not. No, our whole life might be becoming about pushing everyone away because we're now trying to establish that boundary that wasn't in place, or we didn't have that sense of safety or what we learned is, the way to feel safe is by thinking your way to safety. So you run lots of scenarios in your mind. If if this happens, I'll do that. But what if this?

The only way to feel safe is to have a racing mind. Planning everything. Our whole life now is a mind that's over activated the impact of terror. That's what I call that one. So that again, that's the figure out of there, right? Yeah. Right. And so the the impact of the trauma is not the event. It's how it's dysregulated our nervous system. And we're now trying to deal with that by being this figure out. Right. Or it might be that we've learned that that need for love is met by being a super achiever, or it's met by putting everyone else's needs before our own.

So our life becomes about maybe constantly pushing ourselves, or our life becomes about being this pathological, unhealthy helper that's just trying to rescue and save everyone else around us. So I think it's really important to remember, because what made me think of it was your comment around perception. It's not what happens, it's the perception around that, but it's also not the events. It's how we respond to them and how we then become wired and set up in our lives, which is often an attempt to meet those needs that want met or to manage this dysregulated nervous system in all the different ways we do in our lives.

And so the reason why I think this is very important is that it concerns me somewhat that. So on one hand, I think the raising of awareness around adverse childhood experiences or the Aces, as we talk about them, is really is really important. It is really important. But the but the concern for me is that a lot of the conversation is about I experience these events and therefore I have trauma therefore as opposed to these events happened. And then it set certain things up in my life. And it's those things that cause my suffering, not actually event that happened.

The message of hope in that is if the only way to heal trauma is to undo the the event that happened, no one's going to heal from trauma because we I haven't yet found the methodology that I know those ways of kind of working with the unconscious and dealing with traumatic memories and so on, but we can't actually change the event. What we can do is we can change the ways we've learned to live in our lives, like building up these walls, building these habits and behaviors that were set up by the event.

And so to bring this back to working with autoimmune conditions, part of what is really important is, yes, sort of decoding or solving the puzzle of what are the experiences that have led to this, this regulated nervous system, but are healing should be less focused on the past and more focused on the present and the future. Yes, we need to understand how the past has shaped us, but the change can't happen for something that's already happened. The change has to happen in how our system is running now, and how we move into the future from that place, right?

The in in the hurt model, there's you have the event, you have the feeling, you have the nervous system go off in response to the feeling. And then in a nanosecond you have a belief and a meaning you attach to it. And then an adaptive behavior, a response that goes with that and that runs you for the rest of your life until such time that you go into that place where you go, You know, every time I suffer, I'm present. Maybe it isn't about everything around me and circumstances and people in my past.

Maybe this is a really beautiful opportunity, Joseph Campbell style. Right to to really say, oh, there's a there's a belief and a meaning in here that I can go heal and, you know, in the present which will affect my future. So, you know, there's a saying I really love that the child is the parent of the adult, you know, so you really want to take those beliefs that the child created. If you want your older, wiser self to be able to make it into their true wisdom potential. And I love that that idea of non-linearity like we have, we have all of them available to us in the cell of time.

And so we can we can work with that. And it does affect your so-called future self in a in a very profound way. Yeah, I think that's right. And I also think that, you know, raising awareness around the impact of trauma on our nervous system and our nervous system, on our immune system, I think is, is is really helpful and an important I think what's related to that, though, is one of the things that I observe that that I also I find myself concerned about is we have this recognition that I have this trauma and I have this trauma because of these experiences that I had.

And those experiences are very difficult and painful. And because I have this trauma, I need you or I need the environment around me to adapt and change, so I can then feel safe. Yeah. So in a sense, we're continuing the narrative that the external event caused my trauma. Therefore, the external environment has to adapt and change

Responsibility, Community, and Co-Regulation 32:40

to rescue me from my trauma. Now I'm the first one to say that I think we should all treat each other with as much kindness, care, and compassion as we can. And so, for example, as as an employer, I'm always very keen to create a culture, an environment where my teams feel respected and cared and safe and equally. I am not responsible for that in a sense of safety. And I'm also not responsible for for causing significant this kind of harmony for others in the environment that everyone has to constantly adapt to respond to someone, to make them feel safe internally, that that responsibility for our own nervous system and responsibility for our own healing, I think is really important because otherwise the essence of it is still a practice, a pattern of the victim.

It's the this thing happened to me and I was the victim of it, and I'm still a victim, so you have to change. So I am a highly sensitive person, and therefore you need to adjust everything so that I can be with you. Yeah. I'm saying that to Alex, and it's, it's a very concerning to me, you know that. Yes. There's there's highly sensitive, highly sensitive people come from this environment of trauma. And, you know, the resilience building is what's so important. Instead of just resting at here's where I'm at, and I need you to adjust yourself to me.

Right. That's that's just you trapped in your own stuff and that and that's the bit that I think is important, right? It's, you know, there's there's a to put it as I always like to come at things from multiple angles. I sometimes I sometimes deliberately contradicting myself. So I'm going to deliberately contradict myself here. But one of the other things that I find myself becoming increasingly educated about, and I think in a very valuable way, is around neurodiversity and the recognition that we don't all meet the world in the same way.

We don't all process things in the same way. And I think it really is my responsibility as an employer, for example, to create a culture that respects and empowers neurodiversity in different ways of being. And so these are always, always delicate things around where does responsibility lie? And the thing though, that I would ultimately say is the gift that we can all take is if I can be responsible for my healing and of course I'm going to be need to recruit. It takes a village. Sometimes I'm going to need help and support, and I'm going to need to be vulnerable and ask for help.

And I'm going to need to open up to practitioners in ways that may be really challenging and really vulnerable sometimes to do that. But ultimately, the message of hope is that I'm going to do my healing with all the help I can. I can muster, and then I'm not. I'm no longer then going to be a victim of the experiences that happened to me, as opposed to continuing that narrative and inside of, culture that used to be more tribal and is now more isolated. You know, you mentioned earlier with the punch biopsy study, caregivers of people with Alzheimer's.

You know, it struck me that we used to be in a village with each other. There didn't used to have to be one caregiver for a family member who was struggling with whatever kind of, challenge they had. And so we we really have painted ourselves into this very interesting corner, so to speak, of not having the village. So, I appreciate the conversation today, and I would encourage people to really look for ways that you can be in healthy community with others so that you aren't carrying the burden of caregiving, if that's part of your reality right now.

Yeah, yeah. And I also would say, you know, with, you know, what is it now? Almost two and a half years, you know, since the start of the pandemic that we the way we were, the response to that was one of isolating and one of the things that I'm noticing is that a bit like I was saying about homeostasis in the body, that people have normalized to a level of isolation that I'm not sure is healthy. And I see this, for example, in teams at work of they I'm being quite firm about getting people back into the office, for example, because what I notice is that they're often more comfortable at home in the short term, but when they're around other people, you know, they go to commute and all that, the hassle that that might be something happens when people are together and they feel part of not just the idea of being in a team, but the lived experience of sharing ideas and being around people and having a chat over the watercooler, or a chat over having a cup of tea or, you know, it's very English anxiety over a cup of tea, but it's like there's that community is so important.

And, you know, going back to what we were saying earlier around this maladaptive stress response, that one of the elements that will help the nervous system calm and to come back to a healthier place of balance is that contact with other people. And of course, if the reasons why we've pulled away is because of traumatic experiences with others and we built those walls up, we also have to learn to bring those walls down again. And certainly be intelligent of who we invite into our emotional space.

But to recognize the gift and the the, the healing power of that contact with other people. Co regulation. Right? Exactly. Right. So important. I think this is a good place to end co regulation. Thank you so much for spending this time with us Alex. Is there anything that you we haven't covered that you feel burning needs to come out. You know so I if we'd have more time but I'd love for us to go into would be more of the things we can do to really to switch and reset this. And if I can be forgiven a moment of self-promotion, what?

Maybe I'd recommend is that I have a free three part video series, which goes into a lot more of the science of what we've talked about, but also the framework and methodology to reset the nervous system. And people just go to my website, Alex hammer.com, they'll, they'll find at the top of that a link to that, that series. And that's a great way of of giving more time and space to it. But I really enjoy these conversations where we can just spend time together and not be too sort of syllabus driven.

So I really enjoyed our time. Thank you. Thank you. And I think you have a free gift for audience two fatigue e-book. Yeah, exactly. Which is, 12 stories of people who have recovered from, fatigue conditions, fibromyalgia and the Lyme disease, with, our frameworks and approach. So it's a nice way to hear some really uplifting and inspiring stories. Nice. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's been a joy. Thank you. All right, everybody, until next time. Be well.