Dr. David Rabin | How To Manage Stress From A Psychiatrist and Neuroscientist
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If you want to learn how to manage stress and feel better, you're gonna get a lot of value from this episode. Today, Dr. David Rabin talks about stress management techniques and the groundbreaking findings in the use of psychedelic medicine. Join us to find out how to redirect attention to things you can control and restore the sense of safety. Kristel did receive a free Apollo Neuro and she does have a relationship with Apollo Neuro as an affiliate where she would share in the profits from purchases made with the code provided here or on her show or using the links below.
Key Takeaways From This Episode
How to bounce back after a global pandemic
Acknowledging your thoughts and feelings
Benefits of Apollo device
Filtering true and useful thoughts
Psychedelic states and medicine
Body pressure points
Disclaimer: All of the information and views shared on the Live Greatly podcast are purely the opinions of the authors, and they are not medical advice or treatment recommendations. The contents of this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician or qualified health professional for any recommendations specific to you or for any questions regarding your specific health, your sleep patterns, changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
About Dr. David Rabin
Dr. David Rabin, MD, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist, board-certified psychiatrist, health-tech entrepreneur & inventor who has been studying the impact of chronic stress in humans for more than a decade. He is the co-founder & chief innovation officer at Apollo Neuroscience, which has developed the first scientifically validated wearable technology that actively improves energy, focus & relaxation, using a novel touch therapy that signals safety to the brain.
Dr. Rabin is the co-founder and executive director of the Board of Medicine, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization of physicians and scientists establishing the first peer-reviewed, evidence-based clinical guidelines for the production and safe use of currently unregulated alternative medicines, including plant medicines.
Connect with Dr. David
Instagram: @drdavidrabin
Twitter: @daverabin
Clubhouse: @Dr.Dave
LinkedIn: David Rabin MD, PhD
Website: David Rabin MD, PhD ; Apollo Neuro ; Board of Medicine
Podcast: Psychedelic News Hour
Apollo Neuro did send me a device to try with an affiliate link where I would share in the proceeds. Click this link to get a 10% off Apollo. Use code GREATLY10 to get a 10% off on your purchase at www.apolloneuro.com
If you are struggling with feeling overworked or overwhelmed, access the Top 10 Stress Management Tips for the Overworked free right now.
Kristel Bauer, the Founder of Live Greatly, is on a mission to help people awaken to their ultimate potential. She is a wellness expert, Integrative Medicine Fellow, Keynote Speaker, Physician Assistant, & Reiki Master with the goal of empowering others to live their best lives!
Follow her on:
Instagram: @livegreatly_co
Clubhouse: @livegreatly
LinkedIn: Kristel Bauer
Youtube: Live Greatly, Kristel Bauer
To learn more about Live Greatly's transformative online courses for personal development and self-improvement, to discuss collaborations and partnerships, or to book Kristel as a speaker or consultant, click here.
Episode Transcript:
Kristel (Disclaimer)
Now for a quick disclaimer, the views and opinions expressed on this podcast are purely the opinions of the authors. They are not intended to provide medical advice or treatment recommendations. Contents of the Live Greatly podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only, and make sure to always seek the guidance of your physician or qualified health professional when you have any questions regarding your specific health, any changes to diet and exercise and any medical conditions.
Dr. David (Teaser)
We can fool ourselves into thinking that a given thought at any time is either true or useful. What is really hard is for thoughts to pass both in this moment, not in the future, not in the past, but in this moment is critical.
Kristel (Guest Introduction)
If you're someone who's looking to manage stress to feel better and to just have more resilience and happiness in your life. You're going to gain a ton of value from today's episode with Dr. David Rabin. Dr. David is a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, and he's the co-founder at Apollo Neuroscience where he's developed the first scientifically validated wearable technology that actively improves energy, focus and relaxation using a novel touch therapy.
They sent me an Apollo Neuro to try which I've been wearing on my wrist, my ankle, and it is really, really cool. And I'm excited for you guys to all learn more about it. Dr. David and I are going to be talking about how to manage stress, different breathing techniques you can use, how to cope and handle stressful thoughts, anxiety and a lot of really valuable information to help you be an optimal health physically and mentally. Make sure you stay tuned until the end because Dr. David is going to be also sharing about psychedelics and how there's research going on and using psychedelics for things like PTSD and other mental struggles.
So I'm pumped. I can't wait to share this with you. Let's jump into it and welcome Dr. David Rabin to the show.
Dr. David:
Thanks so much for having me Kristel, it’s a pleasure.
Kristel:
For sure. So I would love to start by having you share a little bit about your background so that the listener can get a feel for what you are all about.
Dr. David:
So, as you said I’m a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist. I have a clinical practice that is focused on sort of helping people cool with resilience and management of chronic stress, which ultimately if not managed effectively, we now know without a doubt can contribute to the development or worsening of physical and mental illnesses. And so this has been something that's always interested me because when I was sort of getting my feet wet in the medical field and, and trying to sort of understand what I wanted to do with my life and how I wanted to help people the most or how I could help people the most, it seemed like all a lot of Western medicine is very focused on sort of one organ system or one part of the body. And, you know, even when we would treat that part of the body and do a really, really great job, people would have a lot of relief at the same time they would also still be struggling with a lot of other stuff in their lives.
That stuff was, was oftentimes stress-related and it would impact our ability to heal. It would impact our ability to recover from surgery. It impacts our ability to recover from cardiovascular disorders and metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity and all of these. And so the role of stress came really, really fascinating to me.
And thinking about what impact does this have on the body. Not just from like a single traumatic event or a few traumatic events, but what does that look like over time and how does that, how do we manage it better? Um, and so that led me into psychiatry and neuroscience to study the way that our mind and body work together to help us face and overcome and adapt to stress and ultimately grow from it over time.
Kristel:
Well, that is such an incredibly important topic all the time, but specifically with what we've been going through as a world right now, you know, and coming, hopefully coming out of COVID-19 or heading in that direction, fingers crossed. But you know, that, I think for a lot of people, it's been a very intense experience, you know, there's some traumatic experiences there too.
So do you have any specific recommendations for people and how they can build resiliency and how they can, I guess, balance themselves back out after we've all had, you know, quite a year, year and a half.
Dr. David:
Yeah. That's a great question. It's not a simple answer for everyone. Although I think there are certain things that we've learned that from the neuroscience and psychology of stress that can really help.
So one of them is that we, our body is divided into two major parts of our nervous system. So there's the Sympathetic system, which we call the fight or flight system or the fight flight or freeze response system, which is what happens when we perceive threat from the environment. So anything that that is actually survival, threatening, threatening to our ability to continue on like a predator or a lack of food, water, air, or shelter.
Will trigger that system to turn on or the threat of that, the perception that something might affect our survival, like too many emails, too many responsibilities, too much work, too much news. All of those kinds of overwhelming stimuli can all contribute to the feeling of perceived threat or fear. Even though we don't actually have a survival threat from our emails.
And so that sets off our nervous system to a state we're diverting all of our available resources, blood, oxygen, glucose, everything goes to the parts of our bodies and our minds that are critical for getting out of a threatening environment. So to the skeletal muscles, the motor cortex, the amygdala, and the fear response centers of the brain, and then the parts that, and then the heart and the lungs and all the things that need to go into action to either fight flight or freeze.
But that's not what we want when we're usually dealing with stressful situations on a day-to-day basis. We want to be present and we want to be focused and in control of our experience and our creativity and centered and balanced, not on the extreme of thinking that this interaction with my boss or this interaction with these emails where my kids are threatening, or my spouse are threatening my survival because they're not.
So the simplest way to think about this is that the counter to that, the way to reverse that response when it gets overactive is, and that response gets trained to be overactive because the more overstimulated overwhelmed we are more of the time, the better we get it, our bodies get it being used to being in that state.
So it becomes easier to get into that state. And so the counter to that is to reverse that response is to stimulate us ourselves with safety things. So safety in any way, whether it's soothing, touch, soothing music, breath, taking deep breaths, any of those things sends an instant signal to our emotional brain, to the lit what we call the limbic system of which the amygdala, the fear center is a part of that says just subconsciously.
It says if I have time, to pay attention to the feeling of this soothing, this breath coming into my lungs right now, or the feeling of someone gently holding my hand or giving me a hug or even just touching myself, then I can't possibly be running from a lion right now. And that creates an, a feedback response.
The fear response by basically just keeping in check. It says, Hey, these emails are not trying to kill me. Right. My children are not trying to kill me regardless of how this goes. Things are going to be okay. And I can, I deserve us up moment of pause to figure out how I'm going to proceed here.
And so doing everything we can to restore that sense of safety is actually what rebalances the nervous system from all fight or flight too. Uh, a balance of fight or flight and safety recovery, and that safety recovery nervous system. The more we practice stimulating that with safety techniques of any kind, then the more balanced we feel on a regular basis.
And one of the simplest ways to understand how to do that, not to ramble on forever, but the last thing I'll leave you with, which is one of my favorite and most important ways to think about this is that feeling out of control of our environment more of the time is one of the single biggest de-stabilizing stressors that we have because the more time and the only thing that, and we don't have control, realistically, we don't have control over many of the things, maybe most of the things in our environment on a regular basis. What we do have control over is what we spend time paying attention to and allowing into our consciousness.
So the source of anxiety really in a lot of ways comes from spending more time than not paying attention to things that we don't have control over. And then more of that time, we actually feel out of control. Whereas if we redirect our attention and recognize that, Hey, I actually have control over what comes in here.
I have control over what I pay attention to. What I spend time focusing on then that instantly again, sends another feedback loop that reminds us that I can direct my attention to things that I do have control over like my breath, like touch, like movement, like what I put into my body for food, et cetera, et cetera.
And then all of a sudden, as we start practicing those techniques, the better we get at paying attention to things that we have control over and then the more control we feel in our lives more of the time.
Kristel:
Right. Now , that's incredibly helpful. And you know, my understanding of it is I had been following some spiritual teachers for a period of time who were talking about controlling your thoughts.
And I tried that and it just was awful. It did not work because
Dr. David:
I agree because you, I, you know, you can't control it very hard.
Kristel:
Yeah. You can't control it. You see something, you watch a movie, you watch a scary movie, something when you get triggered and all these random thoughts. So that was really uncomfortable for me cause I felt like, well, what am I doing wrong? Why is this not working? And I felt like I had to suppress these thoughts, which instead of just letting them flow and, and then, you know, I started to embrace more mindfulness practices and what really tends to work for me is recognizing that, you know, thoughts will come and they can be totally out there or weird or whatever, but I don't have to focus on them or scary thoughts or the what if thoughts, you know, but for me, it's about redirecting my attention to other things or to what I can't control or the present moment or my breath.
SoI would love your input on that and how to deal with those fearful thoughts. And for me, I was, um, when I was practicing an integrative psychiatry, you know, I was seeing people going through a lot of hard things and a lot of traumatic things. And then I also was dealing with my mom's, uh, stage four cancer diagnosis.
So that for me was like, oh my gosh, so much stress. And I was doing my integrative medicine fellowship. So I had all these tools on how to calm down my nervous system, [but there still was like an overload of things you can't control. So I would love to hear your insight into how to manage that fear and what your, I guess, how you view managing thoughts.
Dr. David:
Yeah, that's a great question. I think that is what you brought up is the biggest misconception about mindfulness, which is that I should be controlling my thoughts. Right. I should be in control the time of what's coming in and what thoughts are entering in. And I think that, that I've been there too. I think all of us who have been sort of on this journey of trying to become more mindful and up hitting this block at some point and to the most important part of understanding that is that it's not about controlling our thoughts. We can't control our thoughts. We can't really control our feelings to a large extent and all we can control is the way that we interpret those things and how much attention we give to them in this moment.
So it's really about bringing us back to the moment, which the moment we're in right now, which is not only, uh, ancient Eastern, like thousands of years old Eastern and tribal medicine practice, it's also an Ayurvedic practice. It's also a practice of, of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is one of the leading therapeutic modalities for helping us understand the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and actions, and the, the most basic way to think about it is that we can't avoid stress.
We can't, we're constantly surrounded by overwhelming stimuli. Like look at all the things we've been talking about already. COVID COVID alone. And the news alone are enough to keep us like in a tizzy for weeks to really there's a lot of stuff going on around us all the time. All that we can do is create the filter for what is allowed in when it pops up.
And so what cognitive behavioral therapy teaches as a fundamental core of mindfulness, is that thoughts come up, we don't want to deny them. We don't want to even end feelings, thoughts, and feelings come up. We don't want to deny them. We don't want to reject them because if we reject them, it's like, imagine like rejecting your best friend who's coming to you. And they're like, Hey, I need to talk. And they're like, You know, go away, you know, and they're like, wait, but I still need to talk. And you're like, nah, I don't really, you know, I don't hear you to go away and then just knock louder and louder.
Kristel:
It’s keep coming to me.
Dr. David:
Right. And it happens to all of us.
And so that is the biggest misconception. And the way around that is is this practice of acknowledging the experience, right? It's not denying the experience or rejecting it or suppressing it. It's about acknowledging that I'm having this thought right now. I'm having this feeling right now and not judging it.
So we reserved judgment for later and in this moment, because we don't know why we're having a thought when we're having it. We don't necessarily know why we're having a feeling when we're having it. Unless we actually are present with it and take the time to experience it. Once we do that, even if it's just for a second, we can understand, okay, I'm having this thought, I'm having this feeling.
I'm not going to judge it. All I'm going to do is put it through the simple test and the simple, and that test is, is this thought true? And every thought that comes in, needs to pass this test to be worthy of our attention, to be worthy of our time, that it's not worthy of our time in this moment. And there's different thoughts that will pass and fail that test at different times, because it's only about this moment and all of our decision-making capacity and all of our ability to be within the control of our own future and our own lives in general only exists in this moment. We're notoriously terrible at changing the past or notoriously really terrible at predicting the future. But if we use the tools, we have to recenter us in the moment and that's where we actually have the ability to make change that is meaningful and where we can shift our perception of how we're feeling about ourselves and how we're feeling about things we're experiencing and show ourselves that what we're actually in control over.
So this test is actually a fundamental practice of self-gratitude, which is saying I am so grateful for my ability to control my attention. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be able to value my own time, knowing that my time is valuable. It’s one of the most precious resources I have that I'm not going to spend it paying attention to things that are both not true and not useful in my life in this moment.
And that allows us to acknowledge the thought. And then say not I reject you or I ignore you, but thanks for letting me know. I'll come back to you later.
Kristel:
Yeah. I appreciate you coming to visit.
Dr. David:
Yeah. Right. And then acknowledgement allows it to pass much more smoothly than because it's, it's not like it's going away forever.
It's not like we're. Where it's not like we're just, you know, putting the blinders on and letting it just continue to accumulate. It's true acknowledgement. I get it. I see you. I see, I see you in my mind. And I also see that you're not useful to me right now. And so I'm going to let you go and come back to you later.
Kristel:
That sounds extremely helpful. And I think that, um, practice could be really useful for those like ruminating thoughts. And, and when I was going through a lot of this stress in my life, it was the over analyzing and I was becoming hypervigilant because I was getting some health anxiety after seeing what my mom went through.
Seeing all these people in practice. With all sorts of different things, you know, and I think that was also part of the medical training, all the different people I was going through training with you learn something new and you're like, do I have that symptom? But that what you just said, I think would be really, really helpful for people in those high stress situations and just in living your day-to-day life of coming back to the present moment. And this is a great segue into what you're doing with Apollo cause we haven't talked about Apollo yet, which I'm wearing right now, which I've really enjoyed. And thank you and your team for sending me one to try and I've really, really enjoyed it. I've been wearing it.
I think I've had it now for like three weeks. And there's these different, um, you know, different settings that you can use. Right now I have it on the social and open, but I've been doing the meditation mindfulness one in the morning. I, the past few days I've tried the sleep one at night, just so that I could have some input.
And I do feel like I woke up this morning, really rested. So I'm super excited about it. I'm hoping you can just share with the listeners so they know what it is. What's it? What is it all about?
Dr. David:
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm so glad you're having a good experience with it. I'm using mine too. I use it every day.
Um, and I use it on social open for all of my, all of my interviews and cause it, because it just helps me be more present in the experience. And I know it's hard to tell, but I used to have some public speaking anxiety, so like many people. So I think that. I can tell you, I shouldn't say, I think I can tell you without a doubt that having used it over time, that what Apollo does is it delivers these gentle, layered vibration frequencies that are sound waves, but they're low frequency sound waves that feel that are, we feel with our skin, but we don't hear them because they're so low intensity and low frequency.
And just like the kind of sound waves that would come out of a subwoofer. You're listening to music that exists in those frequency patterns, like bass music. And those frequencies stimulate the touch receptors system, just in the same, in this very similar way to what soothing touch does to the body, which sends a safety signal to the brain that says, if I have time to pay attention to this feeling right now, amongst other signals, it says, if I have time to pay attention to this feeling right now, this gentle, soothing, vibration, this gentle soothing touch, then I can't possibly be running from a lion in this moment.
And it brings us back into the center. With our bodies back into balance because our bodies are always present. Our bodies aren't thinking about the future. They're not thinking about the past. They are always present. They store information about the past, but they're not thinking about the past. Our minds can be anywhere.
Our minds can be in the past and the present and the future. It can be a universal way, right? They can be in somebody else's head. They can be anywhere. So the trick of, of sort of breaking or disrupting these cycles of rumination or negative intrusive thinking or negative self thinking or any of these kinds of things is to say, or think about things we can't control is to, by using techniques like breath work touch soothing music, Apollo and Apollo we really created out of my work at the university of Pittsburgh to help people, especially who had. Learned and mastered these other techniques, these other natural techniques that we could give you a wearable that you could put on that would give you a lot of the benefits of soothing touch and breath work on the go.
And originally we developed this for people who had, who were my patient population people mostly right PTSD and depression and addiction disorders. And what happened was we started testing it with these folks and they loved it, but we also started making prototypes and wearing them ourselves to perfect the technology before we released it out to patient populations.
And as we started using it, the doctors, the entrepreneurs, the scientists, the people who were obviously very stressed out and overworked, but not diagnosed with a mental illness. We also receive great benefit from it. I mean, we were started, I've been using this every day and many of my colleagues have using it every day for, since we developed the first prototypes back in 2018.
Um, so this is, I mean, it's been an incredible tool to just help. Help you help us smooth out the transitions between different, different parts of life, because transitions are stressful going from being asleep to being wide awake and working is a stressor going from finishing like a lunch with your friends to back to work is a stressor going from work to meditation is a stressor going from work to spending time with your family and being present with them and your kids is a stressor, every trans and then back to bed afterwards. Right?
All of these transitions of energy states put a stress on the body. Cause, cause when we're already overwhelmed, change itself becomes stressful. And so this, so this technique, like the natural techniques really it's just like, it's like greasing the wheels, right.
It just helps to facilitate smoother transitions from one state to another. And help us show us that we have the ability without a pill, without caffeine, without alcohol, without taking something from outside. We actually have the ability within us to achieve state change at will on a regular basis.
Kristel:
I love that. And I love that you also talk about breath work. So I think the power of touch is so incredibly valuable and the vibration is really soothing. And wait really quick. One question. Can kids wear this or is it just for adults.
Dr. David:
No, it's for kids too. We actually developed this with a focus on vulnerable populations who were not good fits for medicine.
So it can be worn by your average adult or teenager. It can also be worn by kids, pregnant women and elderly folks. It's really made for everyone. And it's relatively simple to operate. And it's very, it's the same kinds of vibration that you might feel from a mobile device, but it's more gentle and soothing.
And so anyone can wear it for different purposes. You just have to adjust it to the specific person.
Kristel:
Okay and you can adjust. I know you can adjust the level of the vibration and can you wear it too much? Is it like max out at 10 hours a day or is it safe to use however often you want to use it.
Dr. David:
Yeah. I mean, there's part of the reason we started with electricity because electricity has been very well studied.
And then we switched to vibration in part, because of, uh, Catherine, my wife's suggestion, when we started working on this project, that it was more acceptable to people. And if we could use vibration to induce the same effects as electricity, then that would be a huge win. And ultimately that was really incredible decision point because by making that switch, we were able to use the vibration patterns, the sound waves that have never demonstrated side effects in the literature. So there's people have studied this stuff for a really long time, the way we're using it as new, but the actual science behind and the work that's been done behind these kinds of stimulation to the body is it is extensive. And so by moving towards vibration and sound waves, we actually were able to use a technology that, or put this into a technology technology package that doesn't have any. It doesn't have it, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have any adverse reactions from what we can tell people are tolerated very, very well of all ages.
Um, and it's it can't, you know, people can't use it too much. And what's really interesting is the more people use it, the more sensitive they get to it. So if you're familiar with this stuff, but cognitive behavioral therapy is a big influence into this space and into the way Apollo works and it’s one of the leading treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder. And the reason for that is because when we start to get stressed out and overwhelmed, we attribute threat to things that aren't threatening. And then with CBT cognitive behavioral therapy, especially with exposure, which is the lead for leading treatment for PTSD in the psychotherapy setting, you can have a therapist with either reminds you that you are safe in situations that used to make you feel afraid or threatened.
And all of a sudden you can, what we call recondition your threat response to not turn on in a situation that you used to find threatening or triggering because you have the safety of the therapist there with you. And so like, it's like having a thunder vest basically, right.
That we for dogs, but we do that for ourselves or swaddling a baby. And so those signals are very, very powerful. 10 tens or hundreds of millions of years old and they go back to ancient mammals longer, much older than humans themselves. So the ability to tap into this is conserve to the nervous system and as you train yourself or we train ourselves to feel safe and to feel especially to feel safe in situations that are stressful, the easier it becomes to do that on our own, without Apollo.
Kristel (Advertisement)
I want to take a moment to talk about the Apollo Neuro, which is a wearable touch therapy that you wear on your ankle or wrist with soothing vibrations that talk to your nervous system, telling you you're safe and in control.
It's a noninvasive stress tool for adults and children. I do have a financial relationship with the Apollo Neuro and I'm going to be providing you with a code and a link in the episode details that you can use if you want to try it for yourself, the code is Greatly 10, which will give you 10 percent off. I do receive compensation when you purchase it.
I also received one myself from Apollo Neuro, and I have really, really enjoyed it. I've been wearing it for meditation. I've also been wearing it to recover when I've had a stressful moment or if I'm feeling anxious and I've been using it for sleep and also for social situation. So there's a lot of different ways that you can try and use it to support your nervous system and your stress response.
Kristel:
I love that. So I, the idea of touch and then also breath work, I think is really powerful. And for me, just the diaphragmatic breathing, the breathing from my belly. And I also like the square breathing 4, 7, 8 breath. But when you have, if someone has that a triggering experience, let's say they're going through something where their anxiety is spiked or maybe someone experiences panic or something like that. And in those moments, I think the CBT, the thought process of is this true, is this useful? It doesn't always work because your anxiety could be like, well, I think that you can't really discern because you're activated like a threat.
So in those moments, what would you recommend for people? You know, obviously they need to talk to their own healthcare provider, but in general, what's some general recommendations. And is there, would that be a time where maybe they would just say like, is this useful instead of saying, is this true? Do you use those in different scenarios or do you just focus on your breath? What do you think?
Dr. David:
Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. These are challenging situations and in the moment of stress, it is always harder to engage in these techniques. This is one of the main reasons why we developed Apollo, because if you're wearing a device and then you could even anticipate your stressful event and you know, like, Hey, I have to do all this stuff today.
I'm more likely to be a little bit stressed out. I'm more likely to be on edge. Then you turn on your Apollo before you go into a situation we can easily fool ourselves into thinking that a given thought at any time is either true or useful. What is really hard is for thoughts to pass both in this moment, not in the [future, not in the past, but in this moment is critical through that tapping into your deep breathing when you're in one of those moments or you haven't mastered, or it's not appropriate to just start deep breathing in the middle of a meeting or a presentation or something like that. Right. Or doing, uh, putting pressure on your chest, which is a big one whole, you know, rubbing your palms of your hands.
Like these are all really helpful, but there are things that you can't always easily tap into the, is it true? Is it useful test? I think is really elegant because it has to be both.
So and so we can spend an a and so we can, and it's again, is like reconditioning us to remember that we have control over our attention. By, by acknowledging the thoughts, acknowledging that it's there and then putting it through this test and making sure that it passes both.
What we ultimately find is that probably for most people, 90 to 95, and I use this test, I use this by myself all the time. So I grew up with standard anxious family. And so we have, you know, 90 to 95% of the thoughts that come in at any given moment are either not true or not useful in this moment, which means they're not worthy of our attention at this moment.
So by forcing all of our thoughts over time, it takes practice obviously. And the more you practice, it's better you get. And we know that we actually rewire our nervous system with practice, which is critical to understand because that's what is creating the real long lasting change that we all want in our lives.
That by practicing this technique, as often as we can, we're literally training our attention to filter out everything that is not true and useful to us in this moment, training that filter is literally training resilience against negative intrusive thinking or rumination. It's about understanding that pathway.
It's there's no instant fix, right? There's no magic button that you can press is not a magic button. It's a help. It's a tool. But there's no real magic button. You can press and just abort a ruminative process or abort negative intrusive thinking, or a really stressful event. We have to cope with it in some way.
And so using these techniques can give us a leg up. But it does take practice. And over time as we do it, we get a hell of a lot better. And then it becomes basically second nature you don't have to think about it anymore.
Kristel:
I love that. I love that. And I know for me when I'm experiencing stress or anxiety, that for me, feels like uncertainty.
It's like, I don't know. It's just, it's hard for me to be certain, like, is this true? I'm like, well, it doesn't seem like it's true, but it feels the anxiety makes me feel like there could be something wrong, but it's a confusing sensation. So I like that. Is this true? Is this useful in this moment because that kind of shifts that a little bit so that you're not paying so much attention or for me, I'm thinking to the sensation of the anxiety , that uncomfortableness, that fight or flight response can activate.
Dr. David:
Yeah, absolutely. And the best way to think about it also in this, in this respect, when you have these kinds of feelings, like what you just brought up, the first thing that our brains often jump to is there must be something wrong with me for feeling this way. That is, we can sometimes convince ourselves that it's true, but it's never useful think about ourselves that way because if we think about ourselves as though there's something wrong with us or having this feeling, what can we do about, Right? There's nothing we can do about it. That's not a useful thought process, but useful thought process is I'm going to express is to let go of that idea that perhaps there's something wrong with me for feeling this way and acknowledged that, perhaps, if I could be grateful for this feeling, then I can understand it and process it and grow from overcoming the challenge.
The challenge being grateful for the challenge is the true power of presence. And that's our true power as humans to adapt and overcome stress. If we do talk about this for again, many generations, which is that resistance is the root of all suffering.
The stress is going to come. The challenges are going to come. Every challenge is another critical step on our, each of our individual paths to growth and becoming an accessing, or are full of cells and accessing our highest potential as human beings, which we don't necessarily know what that is yet until we actually walk the path.
So if we reject the path or resist the path by asking by saying, oh, there's something wrong with me that I'm feeling this way, or there's something wrong with me that I have to overcome all these challenges all the time or why me. Right. Those kinds of narratives actually resist the growth process that we are being encouraged to follow.
And so by embracing that challenge, embracing the process, and it's literally just shifting a mindset to what we call reframing to say, I actually, without judging myself for what I'm feeling without judging my experience, what I'm experiencing, I'm just going to sit with this. And see what I can learn from this challenge, what I can learn from this growth experience and see where things go, and then let's reflect on it later.
Let's reflect on it with my friends. When I think back on this a week from now, or with my therapist, when I talked to them a couple weeks from now, and then we'll think back on it and see what came out of it. And that's where the real magic of life starts to come in from all, all sides.
Kristel:
This is, yeah, this has been such an incredibly helpful, useful conversation.
I don't want to keep you too long. I'm sure. How much, what time do you have to go? I want to make sure I'm respecting your time.
Dr. David:
I think we have till 10 or like another 22 minutes.
Kristel:
Okay, cool. Cause I had, I had put down like 30 to 40, so I was like, I want to make sure about keeping you, cause I do want to talk about psychedelics a little bit and that's something that I don't really know much about we had a lecture in my integrative medicine fellowship with Dr. Andrew Weil, where they talked about, I think it was Iowa sky. And, but I don't know much more than that. And I thought that was really interesting and it's definitely not anything I learned during PA school.
So I would love to hear your take on this and what you're seeing with people who have, I believe you're looking into it with people have PTSD, and I would just love to hear your thoughts on that subject.
Dr. David:
Sure. I mean, if it makes you feel any better, we don't really learn about this in medical school either. Other than that, these are drugs of abuse, which is not exactly a fair, giving them a fair shake because these medicines are extremely powerful healing tools when used properly. I think the best way to understand, understand this whole process is that psychedelic does not refer only to substance or a drug.
It refers to a state of mind. So psychedelic means. Psyche means mind and delics means to show. So really what we're talking about is having an experience where we're able to show or to be witness to our own minds, which is also referred to as mind manifesting or being able to witness or interact with our subconscious material in our minds or the material that is stored underneath awareness.
So what we're experiencing right now, everybody who's listening to this is aware there of our conversation, right? Maybe you're aware of a couple of other things going on in the room, but you're not aware of all of the other trillions or billions of things going on around you in the world at this moment, because we wouldn't be able to function if we were. Right.
We don't have the ability to attend a consciously, attend to much more than one thing at a time. Our subconscious, our bodies have the ability to attend to everything else are we store that information, but it's not abled. We don't access it all the time in our awareness because it's too distracting.
It's just too, we wouldn't be able to function. If we were always aware of, for example, the feeling of our clothes on our bodies or the feeling of the seats we're sitting on, or the noises going around around us in the house. If we were always aware of that, we wouldn't be able to function or focus on anything.
So. What psychedelic means is to access a state of mind, where for a certain amount of time, you're able to come into contact with that subconscious as Freud called it subconscious material, that's stored beneath awareness. And that material can be really valuable because it has a lot of information about us that we're not always thinking about in our day to day conscious mind where, which is focused on survival and focused on our day-to-day functioning and making sure we're keeping up with all of our responsibilities and all that kind of stuff. Freud also referred to often as the ego. And so this part of us is really important. Both parts are really important.
But the subconscious part is the part that comes out in our dreams. It's a part that sends us subtle messages that comes out and we're aware of it in our medic deep meditation states. Um, if you've ever done float tanks, float tanks are a great way without drugs that people experience their subconscious, um, the subconscious minds and any activity for yoga, any activity that helps with presentness.
Presentness allows us and safety allows us to feel safe enough to tap into and access some of this subconscious material. So, so that is what a psychedelic state is. And then when we think about psychedelic medicines and the psychedelic states, this is what we do with psychotherapy. The whole point of psychotherapy is through the experience of empathy and eye to eye contact and making are forming and maintaining a trusting relationship with your clients.
That your client feels comfortable to expose and to come into contact with some of their subconscious material that they might've felt uncomfortable or unsafe bringing up in the regular day-to-day lives. So what psychedelic medicines like MTMA psilocybin, Iowasca ketamine. All of these medicines are different biochemical tools that help to stimulate our minds and our bodies in a very specific way.
Some of which we understand well, and some of which we understand less well, but it stimulates the body biochemically in a way that for a very certain specific amount of time, we have an increased awareness and access to that subconscious material. And so it's really, really important of the utmost important is that we make sure we use those medicines respectfully and carefully with people who know what they're doing in a safe environment, because if one, you're opening yourself up to all of this material, that's beneath your awareness. There's a lot of stuff in there you may not be prepared to bring up and you may not be prepared to work with.
And so having done a lot of work in advance to prepare, and also working with people who know what they're doing to help guide you is really, really critical to making sure thw experiences with these medicines can be as good as they possibly can and as productive as they possibly can because they're very, very powerful tools and they can, as we know, you know, result in uncomfortable experiences as much as they can result in very comfortable healing experience.
Kristel:
So at this point, are there trials that are occurring with this, like for, you know, controlled trials in the U S I don't, I really haven't looked into it, so I don't know, legally.
Dr. David:
Yeah, there's quite a bit, there was an enormous amount of work that was done at like Hopkins and Harvard and Yale and NYU going back into like the sixties, 50 sixties before the medicines, before many of these medicines were made illegal by the DEA. However, recently over the last like 15 years or so 15, 20 years.
Thanks to the work of people like Dr. Roland Griffiths, that Johns Hopkins and Rick Strassmann at, uh, university of New Mexico and Rick Doblin at MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for |Psychedelic Studies. These folks have really spearheaded the clinical research behind these medicines in a rigorous FDA type of strategy that has resulted in incredible findings, some of the best findings that we've ever had for any medicine for mental health. And to give you an idea of what those findings look like, what we're talking about is a single dose of psilocybin mush from the mushroom, which, uh, has shown to result in months of relief from depression and months of relief from anxiety, for people who have never had relief from these symptoms or who have terminal diagnosis of cancer, who are just constantly overwhelmed and stressed out as anyone would be that one single dose of this medicine can provide significant relief that lasts for many months or longer with MGMA, it's three doses spread out over 12 weeks with psychotherapy on both sides. And during that used for treatment resistant PTSD and folks who have had PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder for on average 17 years, over 17 years, without relief after trying every treatment, they can find that these people after just 12 weeks of treatment over 50% of them are no longer meeting diagnostic criteria for PTSD.
One year after treatments done without any followup treatment. One year later, 67% of these people, even more than before. Are no longer meeting diagnostic criteria for PTSD. So it's really shifting the way that we think about mental health, which is that people maybe don't need to take medicine every day most of the time, or a lot of the time.
Maybe it's not about medicine everyday. Maybe it's about teaching people going back to the ancient Eastern and Hippocratic practices of medicine, which is about teaching the individual who wishes to be healed, to heal themselves. And that the medicine experience with MGMA and the psychotherapy is about empowering what we call the inner healing intelligence, or simply put trust in ourselves to heal ourselves.
That when we help empower that process for people, they can actually, and do actually take the healing process into their own hands. And continue to make themselves better over time. And that's what the results have shown, which is absolutely groundbreaking for the field of psychiatry. And it's to give you an idea of the perspective of how much of an improvement this is, this is more of an improvement for these people than we have ever seen of any drug for any mental illness in the history of psychiatry.
Kristel:
Wow. Wow. Yeah. I didn't know it was to that level. So that is like, my mind is blown right now. I don't know if you're open to share this, but have you tried this? Have you done any of these things in like a controlled environment or did you have personal experiences with them?
Dr. David:
So I've what we do. I'm a ketamine. I practice ketamine assisted psychotherapy. Ketamine is currently the only legal, a psychedelic it's medicine. It's an anesthetic that's well studied. It's been around for 70 years. It's very gentle and yeah. In the doses, we use it for depression and PTSD therapy. It's very, very mild, low dose and very good safety profile.
And so when I was trained to provide ketamine assisted psychotherapy, uh, part of that training is for us to experience it ourselves, which is the old way of psychiatry. And this is the way it was always done. In fact, I was just talking to one of my colleagues yesterday. How about Thomas D'etre, who was one of the founders of biological psychiatry from Yale and who started the big, one of the biggest programs where I was trained at the University of Pittsburgh medical center, and really put them on the map as a biological psychiatry hub, which has served them well over the years.
And he is famous for having said there's never been a drug that I prescribed that I haven't tried. And this is the tradition of medicine going back. We've lost a lot of this in the current practice of Western medicine, but this was the tradition going back to the old days, because for us doctors to prescribe a powerful medicine that changes thinking to someone and not be able to understand in ourselves to be able to explain to them what's going to happen, puts us at a great disadvantage to be able to understand what a medicine feels like and how it changes attention, cognition, how it might affect sleep, what kind of side effects might come up, what kind of things somebody might struggle with or how they can use the medicine more effectively to learn from it and to become stronger from the medicine. It is so much help, more easier to be able to explain it to somebody when we have had those experiences ourselves.
With psychedelic medicines, it's even more important because the level of, of shift in cognition and sense of self is even more dramatic.
So we had these experiences with ketamine during our training and without a doubt, Transformative. I mean, it's really, it helps you understand why ketamine is such a powerful antidepressant. It helps you understand why ketamine with psychotherapy and the therapeutic support is absolutely indispensable.
And that yes, ketamine can provide a very significant degree of benefit if it's administered by itself without therapy, but when you combine therapy and you have that support of understanding in the beginning that you bring into the experience and you have that support of understanding during and after.
It actually helps you understand that it's really like an 80- 20 relationship where the medicine is a catalyst that kind of kick-starts you or junk. It's like jumping in the car when the car batteries dead to get things going, but then you have to run the car and you actually have to do the work to make sure that it remembers, that you were remember what to do, when you remember the things you've learned.
And it's really like an 80-20 relationship. It's like a lot of people, I would say they feel it's about 20% of the medicine and about 80% the work you do before and after.
Kristel:
Yeah. This conversation has been so incredible and I've just absorbed so much. We had started doing ketamine at the clinic that I was working for, um, a little bit, and then I left clinical practice, but I saw some really incredible things.
And I just want to stress for the listener, you know, always with all of this, always guided by a healthcare professional. So that's really, really incredibly important. And I just want to share a couple of my big takeaways from our conversation. And then we're going to jump over to go wellness lightning round real quick, and then I'll share how everybody can find the Apollo.
I have a great code that people can get 10% off for it, which your team shared, which is wonderful.
One thing that you mentioned stood out to me, um, was rubbing your palms for stress. And I was like, I haven't heard that before. So that's one takeaway where I was like, Ooh, I'm going to use that. And that you also mentioned the rubbing of your chest.
And I do that without even realizing it. And it brings me comfort. So those were two things. The rubbing the palms, I'm assuming that's just like a stress reduction thing that you mentioned.
Dr. David:
Yeah, it's I mean, it's, there's certain areas of the body. And if anybody's interested, you could check out TSUBO, which is spelled T S U B O, which is the ancient practice of aura of Oriental Chinese medicine and pressure points, acupressure.
And there you'll, you'll find that there's lots of different parts of the body, like hundreds of parts of the body, but you can apply gentle pressure to that can help to improve calm. But the spots that I mentioned, like the rubbing, the part of the, this part of the Palm with your hands or putting pressure on your chest and another spot that's really great is the inside of the outside of the ear.
It's hard for me to show you here, but it's the part of the ear that is on the outside. That's closest to the ear canal and there's a vagus there and a little like the part that's underneath, like your, I don't know if I can show you, but yeah. This part, this flat.
Kristel:
Oh, okay, cool.
Dr. David:
And that part has, it's a little tricky on the podcast, but that part has vagus, a vagus nerve terminal.
And so that's a very effective part that just putting a gentle pressure on helps to calm the body very quickly. I mean, this is another part that's used in acupressure acupuncture. So these have been known for a long time, but those pressure points are extremely useful for a quick little relief and the more you do it, the easier it gets to activate that state.
Kristel:
I love it so that this has just been so incredibly valuable. I want to ask a couple of quick questions. Just give me your immediate responses. Don't need to spend a lot of time thinking about it.
So the first question is what's a book that you would recommend something that you've read maybe in the past year or two.
Dr. David:
So what of my I'll give you one of my favorite books is Eric Kandel’s autobiography. Eric Kandel won the Nobel prize in 2002 for discovering the mechanism of learning and memory. And he talks. I don't usually like autobiographies, but he tells a story about basically the evolution of neuroscience mentioning all of the individual contributors along the way, which is really nice so that you can get a really comprehensive history of neuroscience.
I would say almost anyone can understand,you don't have to be a scientist or a doctor to get this, but it helps you understand why the brain works the way it does, why we learn the way we do, why we develop the patterns we do and how we can change them. And I think that through his own experience and that of the others along the way, and that's one of my favorite it's called In search of Memory by Eric Kandel.
Kristel:
Very cool. Okay. And then, um, we're gonna do one more question. And this one is, what advice would you give yourself from 10 years ago knowing what you know now.
Dr. David:
That's a great question. So. I think the most important advice that I would give is from what's called the four pillars, which is the daily practice of re of building and restoring and maintaining the foundation of trust in ourselves that facilitates healing and facilitates our growth as human beings.
And these are the daily practices of self- gratitude, self-forgiveness, self-compassion and self-love, which are called the four pillars from traditional Shipibo tribal medicine in Peru. And I can't think of anything more important than those four things and practicing those four things on a, everything, even just thinking about them every morning and every night is a start, but really trying to bring them into every moment of our every day.
Because as we think about our life from a standpoint of self-gratitude, all of the sudden we start to receive a lot more graciousness in response, and then we feel more grace in our day-to-day lives. And the process of that using these practices, these thought tools, it's like working out in the gym for our emotional brain and you don't have to go to a gym to do it.
It's a really amazing thing that we all have access to at any time.
Kristel:
I love that. And one thing that I've been doing is if I'm feeling a little overwhelmed or stressed, like I'll put my hands on my chest and I'll just kind of gently rub it and I'll just tell myself something nice. Like, I love you. Like it's okay or whatever it is.
So just some of those little practices could make such a huge impact. This has been incredible. The code to get 10% off of the Apollo is Greatly10. It's going to be an episode details. There's going to be a link in there that you can check it out. If you want to learn more, if you're interested in getting it for yourself or a loved one, and you can use that code to get 10% off.
Aything that you want to share before we close, I will have your website and the episode details so they can access that. I'll put your link to your Instagram. Anything else that you want to share before we come to a close.
Dr. David:
The last thing I'll leave you with. Is that something that comes up a lot in my life lately and also in my work, my clients is that the two, the three most powerful or four, I guess, how many is it?
Four, four most powerful words that we can use in our day-to-day lives are saying to ourselves and others are, “Thank you and I love you” and we need to hear that.
Is it is literally like food for the soul. And if we withhold that from ourselves, then we're just continuing the same narrative that we were taught.
So question what you're taught that's the whole point of life is to question what you're taught and find the answers on your own, figure out what you were taught is right. And what you're taught, maybe isn't right all the time and embrace the journey because that's the best part about being alive today.
Kristel:
That's beautiful. I absolutely loved this conversation. This has been the longest podcast that I've done. So obviously this was a really rich conversation.
So thank you, Dr. Dave, this has been incredible. Really appreciate you spending time with me today.
Dr. David:
Thanks for the time, Kristel. It’s a pleasure.