Strengthen Your Stress Buffers & Build Resilience Now

And then eventually what happens is that the body just burns out and breaks and just stays in that trauma response because it doesn’t have the support in the biology that it needs, and then that guides the tools that we can bring in. And so that’s what’s exciting, is that we have new tools when we look at the biology and in this interview looking at the physiological resilience. So let me share with you that biology from a framework so that as we go into this interview, you understand the lens through which we’re looking at so that you will be able to apply the tools that we talk about in this interview because they are important ones. Here is the biology of trauma framework. I call it the three R’s, where first we recognize the trauma patterns. Meaning how much time is your body spending in the stress response or the trauma response? And then we look for the underlying reasons, and this is where a lot of the professionals in my training program, we spend a lot of time going through these because these are new for them, especially if they are on the mental health side of things, if they’re on the allied health, especially if they’re a functional medicine practitioner of some sort, or they held at least been exposed to it and they’ve heard of some of these things, certainly not all of them, but some of them. And so we look for what are the underlying reasons that are driving those trauma responses and keeping the body stuck in from a physiology. And then once we find the underlying reasons now we can bring in the repair tools. And what we’re going to go over in this interview is how the physiology is more important to support than the psychology, because the physiology will drive the psychology. And so when we can support in this case, our mitochondria, but in a specific way that you’re going to learn about in this interview, which is crucial to understand because we can do it wrong. And so when you support your mitochondria in the right way, you can achieve post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic disorder. Now, what are we doing here? How do we apply the tools? 

There is one more thing that I need you to understand before we go into this interview, and that is that there are three essential elements for the healing journey, for someone to reach their full potential in the healing journey. Now, this is not to say that other modalities that don’t fall into these three are not helpful. There are many modalities that are helpful to somebody at some point along the way, but I’ve been able to narrow it down to these are three essential pieces and that would be the body or what I call somatic work. And this is not just connecting with your body, not just attuning with your body, though, that’s part of it. It’s also being able to recognize which of the three states of the autonomic nervous system your body is in right now and having the tools, the somatic tools to shift that, that’s what I teach in the 21 day journey. We do thoughts and beliefs. We don’t start here because we actually have to start more with the physiology and the somatic work changes the physiology quite a bit, but we do need to bring in thoughts and beliefs and the narratives that we tell ourselves and that have kept us stuck. And the missing piece, The Biology of Trauma. Because as we support our physiology, then things shift and we notice that our psychology changes and we are much more resilient when we are going into any event of life feeling resourced on a cellular level, on a mitochondrial level. So I’m very excited for you to experience this interview today and experience Ari Whitten, who joined me for this interview. 

Ari is the founder of the Energy Blueprint. He is the bestselling author of The Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy and Eat for Energy How to Beat Fatigue and Supercharger Mitochondria for All Day Energy using natural health expert who takes an evidence-based approach to human energy optimization. His knowledge of the body and the cellular processes is amazing. You are going to get so much out of this interview. He has a Bachelor of Science and Kinesiology certifications from the National Academy of Sports Medicine as a corrective exercise specialist and performance enhancement specialist, has extensive graduate level training in clinical psychology and holds a master of science degree in human nutrition and functional medicine. As you can see, this is why I brought him on for this conversation. And so let’s dive into building our innate stress buffers for physiological resilience. 

Ari, I’d love for you to talk about physiological resilience, as you’ve said, that there’s just this focus. For one, there’s a focus on trauma. And I think that that’s becoming more and more accepted in our culture and almost encouraged in our culture. And perhaps that there’s some detriment to that. But when it comes to physiology, that is, I think where you and I agree that those are the keys to your resilience and truly being able to go through an experience of adversity and come through okay and not scarred and be able to bounce back from adversity. So tell us your perspective on physiological resilience, what that even means and how might we start to become physiologically resilient?

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. So I think when we talk about this word resilience, most people think of it purely as a psychological phenomenon. It’s an idea that psychologically we have a mind state that is mentally tough, that is mentally strong, that is capable of bouncing back after adversity. And that’s true. And that’s a beautiful concept. But what most people don’t realize is that there is also a very real and important physiological basis to resilience. It is possible to have a body, and your body is ultimately cells that make up tissues, that make up organs, that make up organ systems, that make up you as a human being. You are a collection of trillions of cells in that way. And there is a cellular basis of resilience. So your cells literally at the cellular level can be capable of handling a high level of stress, can be extremely resilient in the face of stress and all sorts of stressors, from psychological stressors to physiological stressors like sleep deprivation or poor diet or toxin exposure or infections or any number of other stressors that you can think up. Or at the cellular level, you can be very fragile. 

You can be fragile and have very low resistance to psychological and emotional stress, to toxin exposures, to sleep deprivation and to all sorts of other stressors such that at the cellular level, which includes your brain, your brain is composed of cells too. And mind states are very much related to the brain, of course. Obviously this mind body dichotomy thing and Descartes and all that stuff, but of course it’s all one. It’s one, there isn’t a mind separate from the body and what’s going on at the level of the mind and one psychology is very much dependent on what’s going on in your brain at the cellular level, and I would even argue at the whole body, at the cellular level. And what so at that level, again, we can either be very strong and resilient, resistant to stressors, capable of handling stressors and maintaining health and homeostasis. Or we can be very fragile and easily overwhelmed by those stressors. There’s many layers and mechanisms to that story of how do we understand physiological resilience? But that’s the sort of mental level, 30,000 foot view of what’s going on.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And that’s exactly what we understand here with the Biology of Trauma. So what I teach is that emotional overwhelm is actually cellular overwhelm. And there’s the stress response and then there is the trauma response. And the trauma response is the cellular stress response becoming overwhelmed, because it has too many stressors and it doesn’t have the resources that it needs. So that the trauma response is actually an energy problem, not being able to keep up, hold up all that stress that that cell is facing. And when we think of even just the blood flow, like the blood flow is going all throughout the body and the brain, there’s no distinction between no, this blood flow is just cut off at the neck, never reaches the brain. And this is just the blood flow for the brain. It’s one system. And so you have signaling that happens from the cells all in your body and your brain acting as a single unit. So of course, cellular resilience would still equate with psychological resilience.

Ari Whitten, MS

That’s right. I think it’s useful to separate out two things. One is, if we sort of loop into a definition of trauma and I’m curious how you would define it. As a trauma expert, can you tell me how you would define trauma?

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

The big picture view of trauma is, for me, anything that for any reason at that time overwhelmed our body’s ability to respond.

Ari Whitten, MS

Okay, perfect. So I think it’s amazing.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Did I pass the quiz?

Ari Whitten, MS

No, it’s not. It’s not a pass. I’m legitimately asking you to define it because I think you could define it better than I would. And I knew that you would provide a good definition for me to work from. So, I think it’s useful to consider that there is such a thing as post-traumatic stress disorder and there is also such a thing as post-traumatic growth and what defines the difference between somebody who goes through a trauma and then is dysregulated for a long period of time at the level of the body, at the level of the brain, at the level of psychology, post-traumatic stress disorder, versus somebody who maybe experienced the same trauma, the same experience, who went through the same thing but got stronger from it. Okay, let me take this out of the realm of psychology and emotions for a second and make it easier to understand so that it’s less controversial. And I will anger and trigger less people. If someone goes out. I live in Costa Rica, okay? And I often spend mornings in the ocean surfing in the sun. If someone comes out with me into that experience, there’s a few layers I could talk about here. But let’s just talk about the sun, for example, if someone goes out into the sun with me, that sun includes exposure to ultraviolet radiation, which in large amounts is damaging to the skin, can cause DNA damage. 

We have a built in mechanism in human physiology and inside of our bodies we have a built in internal sunscreen and it’s called melanin. And guess what produces more melanin? Well, regular exposure to the sun stimulates your body to increase melanin production. So you get a tan in your skin that acts as an internal sunscreen. That makes it so that when you go out in the sun, that sun doesn’t damage your DNA because your body, through regular exposure to sun, creates a built-in adaptation that protects it from DNA damage. Now someone else can come out with me surfing who doesn’t go out in the sun regularly, get the same exact amount of sun exposure that I got and have a huge sunburn and have lots of DNA damage in their skin. And we could create similar examples around, you know, just the surfing experience going out in big waves for one person. For me, since I’m comfortable with that, that’s fun, that’s play, like someone else could come out with me on a day where I’m playing and having fun and very comfortable and be thrown around and tossed around and almost drowned and be totally traumatized from that experience.

So trauma isn’t the objective experience. Trauma is the relationship of the intensity of maybe a difficult experience relative to what that person can handle. And when there is a big gap between the intensity of the heart experience and the person’s internal resources and ability to handle that. There is a much greater likelihood of it resulting in dysfunction in a post-traumatic stress disorder rather than post-traumatic growth. Same principle is true of exercise. If we go into the gym and we do a hard workout with weights, if it’s close to my limit of what my body’s capacity is, then I’m stimulating growth. I’m stimulating beneficial adaptations. If I take somebody who doesn’t exercise regularly and put them through the same workout, all they will do is cause a whole bunch of damage to their body. There will be no net gain from that. It’s essentially physical trauma and all of this is very much analogous to what’s going on psychologically and emotionally with trauma. One dimension is this psychological dimension. What is your built-in experience and capacity psychologically, emotionally, to handle various kinds of psycho emotional stressors? And then physiologically, at the cellular level, what is your physical capacity, stress buffering capacity, which is really synonymous with cellular and cellular energy production capacity, as you and I have spoken about previously, very much centered around the mitochondria are cellular energy generators. 

Cellular and energy production capacity is essentially stress buffering capacity at the cellular level. If you have a robust mitochondrial engine that can produce lots of energy, you can handle increased demands that come with stress and you can maintain physiologically, maintain health and homeostasis and balance. Now, on the other hand, if you have a weak cellular engine, if your mitochondria have shrunk and shriveled over many years, and we know from lots of lines of research that the average seventy year old has lost 75% of their mitochondrial capacity and they’ve lost 50% of the number of mitochondria in their cells. And each mitochondria that is present has only 50% of the energy production capacity. By the way, this is not a normal product of the aging process itself. This is not actually a natural product of aging. This is a product of modern lifestyles. And we can talk about why I know that if you’d like to digress on that. I know we’re short on time though, so I’ll be quick. So if you are in a state where you have a shrunken, atrophied cellular engine, like most people do, your stress buffering capacity shrinks, your capacity at the cellular level to handle increased demands which come with stress. It comes less and less and less. And then as you use the word overwhelm, so and then as a stressor comes along and the lower your stress buffering capacity, the more likely any external stressor that you might encounter is to overwhelm that system physiologically. 

Now, what happens when the system is overwhelmed? Well, the best model for understanding this is the cell danger response from Dr. Robert Naviaux. And it basically talks about mitochondria as having two roles. They’re not just the mindless cellular energy generators that we were taught about in high school and college and graduate school biology and physiology courses. It turns out, not only produce the energy in our cells, but they also act as these canaries in the coal mine of our body. They’re essentially the most sensitive thing in our body. They’re acting as these environmental sensors, and they’re constantly asking the question, surveying the environment of what’s going on in the body, asking, is it safe? Are we under attack? Is it safe for us to produce energy? And you can imagine, like being in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, preparing dinner, and then as soon as a burglar comes in and puts a gun to your head and says, hey, give me all your money, take me to your bedroom and show me all your valuables and give me all your jewelry and whatever or else. You’re not going to just keep chopping vegetables and preparing dinner. You have to deal with that threat. So when mitochondria detect that threat, they shift resources away from energy production towards cellular defense, and that is essentially overwhelmed at the cellular level. So when they’re when the body is exposed to a stress that’s beyond its capacity to handle, to buffer that stress, then the mitochondria shift the cell into defense mode, out of energy mode, into defense mode. And that triggers fatigue, that triggers depression, anxiety, that triggers all these symptoms basically feeling crappy. And that defense mode is part of the physiological response of being in a state of trauma.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And from what we understand of how that trauma response is actually signaled in the body, it’s coming from the vagus nerve, but the dorsal nucleus of the vagus nerve and it’s signaling to the mitochondria it is not safe right now to make energy. And so it literally is shutting down all the mitochondria in that moment to go into a massive cell danger response. And you’re going to feel all of a sudden overwhelmed and you’re going to notice thoughts of, I can’t do this anymore. This is too big for me. And you’re going to have this physiological response that’s happening with what you sense as the emotional response. But it’s happening even down on the mitochondrial level, which I think is fascinating for people who don’t really understand that this is actually happening at your very core.

Ari Whitten, MS

That’s right. And let me connect one little thing just to tie this in and to go back to this idea that mind and body are not separate. There’s a relatively new field of research called Mitochondrial Psychobiology. And it’s the connection between mind and mitochondria and studies that show that when you subject people to extreme stress for example one of the studies that has been done by Martin Picard, one of the probably the lead researcher in the field of mitochondrial psychobiology. They did a study where they basically had people on stage doing public speaking. And of course, many people are more afraid of death than they are of public speaking. And they had these people do public speaking. And then they also subjected them to an audience that was like slinging insults at them and yelling profanities and creating a lot of stress as you can imagine, extreme stress. 

They measured literally within seconds or at the most minutes of exposure to that, the presence of mitochondrial DNA in the bloodstream. Mitochondrial DNA should not be in your bloodstream. It should be in your mitochondria inside of your cells. For people listening, not floating around in your bloodstream. So what that means is the psychological stress within seconds induced cellular damage at the mitochondrial level that led to leakage of contents of mitochondria, which in turn acts as a dangerous signal throughout the rest of the body, and acts as a signaling molecule that the body is under attack. So, again, psychology and physiology are not separate. These things are intertwined literally, instantaneously. And what’s going on there then affects the mind states. If you have signaling molecules floating around in your blood saying we’re under attack, that is affecting how your brain cells are working and what mind states they’re triggered into as well. So it’s all circular, it’s all bidirectional.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And then, I mean, you’ve just really opened the floodgates with that because now you have all this mitochondrial DNA in your bloodstream. And so there’s all these downstream consequences to the physiology, to the biology. And what does that mess look like? What can people expect in terms of symptoms, conditions, diseases, even if this is happening chronically to them?

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah, basically a shutdown of your physiology. So there’s a term in the literature called sickness behavior and this is characterized by fatigue. It’s basically how you feel when you’re sick. So think of the last time you got a bad flu or cold or COVID or something like that. Like how do you feel when you’re really sick, when you have an infection, that’s sickness behavior. You have a lot of fatigue, you have lethargy, you have apathy, you have lack of motivation and drive, you have lack of vitality and passion. You’re in more of a depressed mood. All of those psychological and emotional and mood changes, parallel your physiology, your cells shifting from energy mode, peacetime metabolism into war time metabolism to the extent that your cells are essentially sensing we’re under attack, we need to go into wartime metabolism. You are not in a positive mindset where you’re experiencing lots of joy and pleasure and gratitude and all these fun emotional states that the state of physiology links up with is designed to link up with fatigue, lethargy, depression, lack of motivation and drive and a poor mood. And that’s partly important to understand this is partly largely by design. This is an intelligent adaptive system because in an evolutionary context, if you are under attack, if you are under extreme stress, you’ve got a bad infection or you have a big injury, let’s say you’ve got a bad injury on a hunt or something like that.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Is the time to rest?

Ari Whitten, MS

Yes. Your body wants you to conserve energy. It wants you to lay on the couch, so to speak, or lay on the ground in your hut and conserve energy to allow resources and energy to flow, to healing whatever needs to be healed, whether it’s the immune system fighting something off or healing damaged tissue. It doesn’t want you to continue expending lots of energy to feel in a good mood, to feel energy and motivation and drive, to continue to expend lots of energy. So this is by design. But the problem is, now in a modern human context where we have so many chronic stressors that put us into the state of physiology all the time, now it becomes very maladaptive.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And this is where I talk about people can actually be living in a chronic trauma response, trauma physiology. Because the stressors have been for so long and for so much that their body is hardly able to ever get out of that energy conservation state and shut down state anymore. And more and more, they are spending more time on that specific physiology. But as I reflect on these symptoms of this shutdown state, I like the lethargy and the fatigue and lack of motivation. Ari, I’m just so thankful that we have antidepressants that can really help these people. And we’ve got therapy that they can go talk to someone, talk to someone get started on an antidepressant and this all goes away. 

Ari Whitten, MS

You know, there’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and I have a lot of thoughts on this, and I’ve got a lot of research and evidence to back me up on this. But I have an unpopular way of thinking now, that seems to be relatively uncommon. I think it’s the more I’ve learned, the more I think, the focus on disease, the focused on pathology and trying to understand pathology and like operating in a conceptual framework and a paradigm in a belief system, where we think that the deeper we go into understanding problems, disease pathology, the more we will be able to reverse it and get back to a state of normal. I think it’s not entirely but mostly a fantasy, mostly a delusion, and mostly not very productive. What I think is that instead of studying darkness, we need to focus on studying light and adding light to correct darkness so the solution and I cannot emphasize this enough. This is a different kind of thinking and it leads to different solutions. If I think that the way to solve depression is to study the biochemical and neurotransmitter abnormalities that are associated with depression, then I might say, oh, we found the cause, quote unquote, of depression. It’s a serotonin deficiency in your brain. Let’s use our fancy science, which we’re so sophisticated, where we’ve got so much science, we’ve got thousands of studies, trillions of dollars poured into all this research. Let’s since we now know all of this complicated biochemistry that’s associated with depression, let’s develop a drug that interrupts this abnormal biochemistry that causes depression. Voila. Antidepressants. Okay, that’s one way of thinking. Another way of thinking is to understand the human body, as the product of millions of years of evolution, as an intelligent, dynamic, adaptive system that is designed to express health. 

And when there is pathology present, what you need to do is ask the question, what are the conditions that created this pathology? And humans are remarkably good about doing this in every context except ourselves. So as a simple example, if you stumbled across a lake and lots of the fish were floating on the surface, dead, with ulcers and with tumors and with their guts spilling out of them and all kinds of disease, obesity and cancerous growths and all kinds of things and neurological disease. And they were depressed and all these things. What would any biologist do in that scenario? They wouldn’t set up little hospitals on the shore to administer medications for drugs, to try to reverse all the pathology present in each one of these diseases, which is exactly what modern medicine is doing. They would say something’s really off in the environment here because these fish are designed to express health. And so we need to fix the environment. Something is off in the habitat. We need to fix the environment so that these fish can express what they’re designed to express, which is health. 

So if I think about depression in that context, I go, okay, someone’s depressed. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they’re eating McDonald’s and a bunch of crappy food. And that relates to brain health and it relates to gut health. And we know there’s a gut brain axis. Maybe it relates to the fact that they’re not getting any natural light exposure. And we know that circadian rhythm and sleep are intimately tied to the story. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they’re sedentary. We know that exercise is actually more potent as an antidepressant by itself, just that one variable is more potent than antidepressant drugs. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they’re socially isolated and lonely and don’t have a community around them, don’t have healthy relationships. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with that. Let’s focus on biochemistry and give an antidepressant drug. These are different kinds of thinking. And what I’m saying is the solutions to most of these problems don’t actually lie in better understanding of pathology and disease. That doesn’t actually get you most times to a place of health. What we want to study is the science of health. How do we build health? And what’s important here in this context that we’re talking about is what I want to emphasize is there’s a place for studying trauma and dealing with your trauma. Absolutely. 100%. I think it’s, what I want to say, just as if not more important, you can push back on me if you disagree. Important to study the science of resilience and put our focus on building resilience in the mind and body.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

I think that what we’ve learned from enough years of trying conventional medicine is that health is not just the absence of disease. And so we can’t throw something into the system expecting to take the disease away and for the system to automatically be healthy. And we also know that we in general become what we behold. And so when we focus on the problem, we just get deeper into that. Whereas, when we focus on resilience, when we focus on movement, when we focus on getting the right rhythms into our life, then we will move towards that. And the more that we move towards that, our system is able to move more towards regulation and order and health. And when we look at why movement, for example, is more potent than an antidepressant, which I loved when that study came out and why might that be? We were just talking about how people go into this sickness behavior and what does that look like? What does it feel like? It feels like the opposite of movement. You’re sedentary, you’re lethargic, you’re fatigued, you have no motivation. And so bringing in movement, which is the opposite of that, you’re already moving towards resilience just with movement. And your system is going to experience changes and shifts, even though you never took an antidepressant.

Ari Whitten, MS

That’s right.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Do anything directly to the serotonin system, because the serotonin system is not necessarily the problem. It was even what is driving all of that. And it’s like the operating system. And we need to just change the operating system and more towards health and resilience. And when we focus on that and just take steps to move towards that, things start to fall into place.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. And the whole idea that even if we want to look at things through a pathology focused paradigm, the whole idea that depression can be reduced down to a serotonin deficiency is nonsense. Number one, most of the research that’s emerged lately has shown that the serotonin model isn’t even true. Most of the science doesn’t even support it, but we have lots of layers of evidence for other layers that are going on physiologically. For example, inflammation is very strongly linked with depression. Oxidative stress at the level of the brain is linked with depression, dysregulation and the HPA axis and mitochondria.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

We like all the things that you’ve just mentioned are part of the trauma response.

Ari Whitten, MS

That’s right. And mitochondrial dysfunction, more and more are being linked with depression, anxiety and many other types of mental illness. What we see when we really start to understand physiology is that this idea that there is a disease over here caused by this one abnormal by a biological, biochemical pathway, and there’s another disease over here caused by this other biochemical pathway that’s abnormal. And another one over here caused by this other pathway that’s abnormal. And so we can develop a drug for this one. A drug for that one, a drug for this one. The whole thing is nonsense and pseudoscience. What we have come to portray as, quote unquote, evidence based medicine, what most people think is very the scientific paradigm is largely pseudoscience and based on a deep ignorance of how human physiology actually works and how it’s a system that’s interconnected. And what I mean by that, here’s what’s interesting and let’s talk about resilience and this. If this would be a good way to make sure I deliver what is important for people to hear. So let me say this again. Your body is a living, intelligent, dynamic, adaptive system. It is constantly adapting to the stimuli that you put it through. 

And I’ll give you a simple example of this. If you break a bone, let’s say you break your leg and you have a cast on your leg for eight weeks. You go to the doctor. Eight weeks later, they saw off your cast. You look down at your leg. It’s half the size of the other one. Why? All those muscle fibers atrophied in just two months. They atrophied. Your leg shrunk to half the size. The reason why is that your body only cares about survival. And as soon as you immobilized that leg, your body went, I guess we don’t need all that energetically costly muscle tissue anymore. Let’s get rid of it. That’s in two months. Now consider that the same exact process happens at the mitochondrial level. Remember I told you mitochondria are the basis of physiological resilience. The same exact process of atrophy happens at the mitochondrial level when mitochondria are not challenged and stimulated just as a muscle shrinks. When it’s not challenged or stimulated, mitochondria shrink when they’re not challenged or stimulated.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Just like you say, with Melanin, when you are not out in the sun.

Ari Whitten, MS

Exactly. So your body, your skin gets pale. If you’re not regularly exposing it to the sun, it’s exactly the same principle. Muscles grow if you challenge them with weights, muscles shrink if you don’t challenge them and if you immobilize them and all of our physiological processes are like this, everything in your body is like this.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

This makes me want to jump in, but I really want you to finish. I like to hold my tongue.

Ari Whitten, MS

So again, most people who are seventy years old have lost 75% of their mitochondria. They went from when they were 20, a Ferrari engine in their cells to when they’re 70, a moped engine in their cells and the moped engine doesn’t handle stress very well, it’s very easily overwhelmed by demands and triggering the mitochondria into defense mode into overwhelmed trauma mode. The good news is just as an atrophied muscle can be rebuilt by challenging it, stimulating it, so too can our mitochondria. And in fact, there’s many other layers of the system. We have an internal antioxidant defense system along with this that is capable of neutralizing all the oxidative stress and damage that is associated with depression and anxiety and many other mental illnesses and many other chronic diseases. And that system is made more robust in exactly the same way that your skin creates more strength through exposure to stressful stimuli. Your internal, your mitochondria grow bigger and stronger through exposure to stressful stimuli. Your internal antioxidant defense system that neutralizes oxidative stress grows stronger and more robust and capable of neutralizing oxidative stress, free radicals by challenging it with oxidative stress. What does that mean? It means hormetic stress, basically. And this includes exercise, it includes heat, it includes cold, it includes breath holding practices. There’s several other types of things, even light exposure, UV light red, near infrared are hormetic stressors. 

And all of these act to create a transient intermittent burst of free radicals, bursts of stress on the system that trains the system to be bigger and stronger and more robust and protected more that is more resistant to more resilient to future exposures, to stress and all of those systems, here’s the interesting part, the adaptation that you get by doing this from exercise, from heat exposure, like sauna, from cold exposure, from breath holding practices, from light exposure, create adaptations that don’t just make it resistant to that one stressor but they actually, since the system is totally interconnected, they actually create adaptations that make it resistant to like universally resistant to stress period, to a broad range of, other stressors. So you are building increased resilience at the cellular level. We know, for example, exercise protects against oxidative stress associated with depression at the level of the brain, breath holding practices create adaptations that protect you from mental stress and depression and anxiety. So the sauna exposure,. All of these things are interconnected because they’re acting on the same systems of resilience. We have a universal system of resilience in our physiology, and it’s a universal stress resistance system. And it’s not specific to only one type of stress, and we can leverage that to our advantage to build resilience into the system. And I would argue that that is the fundamental difference between post-traumatic stress disorder versus post-traumatic growth. Do you become weaker and dysfunctional from exposures to stress? And are you fragile or are you resilient and strong?

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

So, Ari, last question for someone who’s listening to this. I’m that fragile person. I don’t have any capacity for stress. My body seems to break. What would be the place that you would tell them to start here for building the mitochondrial resilience? I think I know what your answer is going to be, but I’ll let you answer.

Ari Whitten, MS

We have a Goldilocks zone. So with any of these stressors, there is what’s called the biphasic dose response. And what that means is if you do a little bit, then you don’t get much of an effect. If you do way too much, way beyond what your body is capable of as we talked about earlier, all you’re doing is creating net harm and damage or trauma, physical or psychological trauma or both. So there’s a Goldilocks zone. You’ve got to get the dose right. You have to do enough to get the effects. Not too much that you’ve overwhelmed the system. So that means you have to find the dose that is appropriate for what your body and mind can handle. And that is a difference of tolerance. If you are currently chronically ill and very fragile, you have to start with very small doses. And it can be with exercise, it can be with sun exposure, it can be with cold plunging, it can be with breath holding practices. But the key is to start very slowly, and cautiously and work in baby steps. And conversely, the one other thing that I want to tell people that’s important is, it is not enough to just do the thing and like a lot of people they have a certain routine and they do their routine. You actually have to push your boundary of what your body is capable of a little bit too much and you create a problem, but you have to push it a little bit in order to stimulate the adaptations that actually create increased resilience. If you just do the thing and you do what your body’s already adapted to and comfortable with, you’re not stimulating new adaptations. So you have to find that balance for you that’s in that Goldilocks zone. You’re stimulating adaptations, but you’re avoiding doing way beyond what your body’s capable of such that you’re creating harm.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

What a power packed interview. It is rare for me to be able to go this deep and have this level of conversation about trauma and trauma physiology with someone who is on the science side of things. And I absolutely love it. And I know that you got a lot out of this interview. So remember that you can purchase all the recordings, have it available to you at any time so that you can be stress free and always have these resources be resourced. And with that, I am your host doctor Aimie, for this Biology of Trauma Summit 3.0. Still time to share it with friends, with family. And I will see you in the next interview.