Fear Doesn't Always Look Like Fear - Understanding the Behavioural Responses to Stressors

One of the most important things to understand about stress and survival responses is that fear rarely looks like fear. Once you can make your peace with that, everything else starts to make a lot more sense.

I’m going to do my best to distill a very complex web of variables into an easily digestible format here to try to help you navigate some of what you’re going to see from both yourself and other people over the next while.

For me, all of this information is organized in a kind of complex thought-map flow chart that would NOT make any sense if I tried to draw it for everyone. So, please bear with me and feel free to ask questions about any of this to help clarify when it gets a bit clunky. Also, recognize that this will be a series of posts because otherwise it’s going to be a huge novel and no one wants to have to sit and read that.

Ready? Let’s begin.

First, the behavioural response you’re going to see from any given individual to any given stressor depends on a few things: a) their underlying brain architecture type, b) their underlying nervous system type, and c) the nervous system response to d) the stressor itself.

Brain Architecture Types

Brain architecture types are incredibly complex and I could write a whole book just on those, but that’s totally outside the scope of what I’m trying to accomplish with this blog series, so I’ll just say that there are 6 main ‘normal’ architecture types and a whole bunch of fun, other side categories. You don’t need to know any of that, but if you’re interested you can do some deep dives on it and I’m happy to provide some good information around it. The important take away is to recognize that not all brains process information the same way.

The best way I can help make this make sense is to think about the things that people focus on from a values and activities perspective - someone who is artistic and musical has a different brain structure than someone who is analytical and methodical is different from someone who places significant value on protecting others, etc etc. The ways that our brains process information and then organize that information into ‘what we should focus on’ is the underlying basis for the base personality types that we see in the people around us. Some people love math and science and don’t care much for emotions. Some LOVE emotional experiences and would rather Feel something rather than dissect it analytically. This is generally why we have so many different political parties - the different brain types all look for people who generally match the underlying value system that our brain structures dictate. This is why conservative values people cluster together, and liberal values people cluster together, etc etc. Political parties, successful ones, try to have as broad a value system as to appeal to the most brain types possible without becoming so broad as to alienate their base brain types. That’s neither here nor there, but it’s also a fascinating area of research.

A main takeaway point for this post is that it is incredibly important that you recognize that underlying brain structure is unchangeable. You are not going to get one brain type to change to another brain type, no matter how much you try to argue with or convince them. They literally can’t do it. The sooner you accept that about people, the easier it all becomes. Nervous system type you can absolutely change over time based on the experiences that that brain type encounters, but you will NOT change the way someone’s brain structurally functions.

A handy way to think of it is the piano versus the piano player. The type of piano a person has to work with is unchangeable - you’ve got a whole range of kinds of pianos from grand pianos to electronic to an app on a iPad. In this example, the piano you’ve been given is the only one you get. You can’t change that. This is different, however, from the person who is playing that piano. So, you can have the biggest, most complex, beautiful grand piano matched with someone who can only shakily play hot crossed buns, or a beat up electronic synthesizer that’s missing 3 keys matched with an orchestra level pianist and that person is still going to make the most beautiful music on that sucker. The piano player can get better or worse at playing the piano they have. THAT’S the only piece of this equation that can be modified - how that brain type is programmed. But if that piano is missing some keys, you’re not going to change that. You can’t make another person process information the way your brain processes information if it doesn’t already do that. You can program it to learn how to put more emphasis on the things you want it to, but it’s not going to happen YOUR way. You have to learn ITS way to do that and work with it to accomplish it.

Why this is important - during times of stress, we look for people whose brain types match ours. This can lead to tribalism and a lot of distrust and aggression towards ‘other’ brain types. People get all worked up and say things like, ‘I just don’t understand how so and so can believe/support x/y/z thing’. This leads to judgement and arguments where you try to ‘logic’ this person into matching YOUR brain type, which, again, is impossible. When you really stop for a second and look at it, most arguments between people really come down to both sides trying to convince the other to match their brain type. Learning how to see things from the other brain type’s perspective rather than trying to convince them to match your own is how you can mitigate and avoid most of that and actually get the thing you want accomplished. But! To do that, you have to learn how to let go of a very particular nervous system response in yourself first.

What I mean by that - recognize that when we’re happy and calm and not in a stress response, we easily accept and acknowledge other people’s differences. As soon as we start feeling like ‘I don’t understand how so and so could be…’ it’s important to realize that this is YOU in a stress response. The second we’re in a stress response, our behaviour changes from ease and flow and acceptance into trying to control either ourselves or our environment and the people within it. It’s a key hallmark of the line between our normal state and our stress response state. What we choose to try to control during our stress response depends on our underlying brain architecture (people like me are fine, people not like me are threats), our nervous system type (internal versus external locus of control) and the type and severity of the stressor itself (stress response versus survival response, direct threat versus indirect threat, known threat versus novel threat). So, during times of stress, we either try to make the other person match our brain type, or make ourselves match theirs, or avoid the whole thing altogether - all of these are types of nervous system response (fight, fawn, flight) applied to interpersonal relationships, none of which are helpful for working through an interpersonal conflict because you just end up arguing about and trying to justify your own brain type and who should match who rather than find a solution to the issue at hand.

With me so far? See what I mean about complex thought-map flow chart? It gets easier though, I promise. Stay with me, this next part helps this make more sense.

Nervous System Types

Again, super complex area of study with all kinds of facets you can get into if you’re interested, but the key points I’m going to focus on for this blog series are about who and what you try to control when your stress response kicks in. There are two main types - internal locus of control and external locus of control. The fun thing about this is that it’s not a base type. It’s changeable. You may be an internal locus of control type in your rest response and an external locus in your stress response and then may switch back to internal during a survival response, or any combination thereof. You may be an internal type for some types of threats (direct versus indirect) and an external for others (known versus unknown).

The key points to think about when trying to decide which type you are have to do with who and what you try to control both when you’re calm and relaxed, when you’re stressed, and when you’re in a survival response (I go over these in the next section, so hold tight).

An internal locus of control person believes that you can’t control the circumstances, you can control how you respond to the circumstances. They don’t like to believe in fate, but rather that it’s choices and decisions that lead to a particular outcome. In a normal, calm state, they are likely to believe in personal choices and behaviours. There are both good and bad forms of this. They take a lot of personal responsibility for things totally outside of their control. Again, this can be totally normal and healthy. For example, they believe that a lot of health conditions can be managed through proper diet and exercise. Sounds perfectly reasonable, right? But wait until we throw some stress into this situation.

First, external locus of control people tend to find comfort in the idea that it’s fate or luck that determines outcome. They tend to control their internal state by controlling their external state - preferring stimulating or calming environments to cause an internal state of joy or relaxation, for instance, rather than producing an internal state of joy or calm regardless of the external environment. As with internal locus of control folks, there are good and bad versions of this.

So, let’s go back to our ‘health is managed through personal choices in diet and exercise’ person. This person can actually be either an internal or an external locus of control nervous system type depending on what is motivating this belief.

An internal locus of control person believes that it’s the personal control and will power over themselves that causes either a healthy or unhealthy outcome. An external locus of control person believes that it’s external forces of genetics, response to life stresses, the food industry using preservatives, etc, that are responsible for an individual’s personal choices that result in a healthy or unhealthy outcome.

With me so far?

Both are correct. Or rather, neither is incorrect. In a relaxed state, either of those people can exist quite comfortably. But let’s add some stress to this situation.

An internal locus of control person who believes that health is managed through personal choices in diet and exercise goes one of two ways - both ways focus on increasing a dopamine response by controlling their diet and exercise. One will either become more focused on healthy interventions, and one will become more focused on unhealthy interventions - whichever gives them the most reward. Meaning, one will begin to restrict their food to ONLY the healthiest options, the other will begin to indulge in unhealthy options. Add more stress to the point of a survival response and this may result in extreme dietary restriction, like anorexia, or over-exercising. Or it may result in binge eating and becoming overweight or obese. Both are examples of internal locus of control responses.

Make sense so far?

An external locus of control person, under stress, begins to judge OTHER people’s dietary and exercise habits, not theirs. They begin to mock, bully or harass people, either online or in person. The good version of this is trying to make ‘helpful suggestions’ to friends and family. That person who responds to stress by home cooking healthy meals for their family, for instance. LOTS of ‘wellness influencers’ are actually just external locus of control types who are managing their life stress by telling everyone else how they should live, for instance. Add even more stress to that individual, and they become the protestors of the food industry - ‘this totally benign substance MUST be removed from EVERYONE’S lives because I read online that it might harm a small subset of individuals even though it’s health protective for the majority of people and you MUST ALL agree with me or you’re the enemy!’.

You can’t get either an internal or external locus off whatever they’ve chosen to hyper fixate on while in their stress response, especially if that stress response has increased to a survival response. You’ll just further entrench that response because you are accidentally telling them that your brain types don’t match, thereby making you THE threat to their safety. You need to get them back to a normal, calm, relaxed state to turn it off and then redirect them to whatever the ACTUAL things causing their stress are and help them to navigate those things. But that can only work as long as you, too, aren’t accidentally in your own stress response and trying to control theirs as a means of controlling yours.

Why is this important? Having an understanding of your own responses and where you are in the spectrum of response helps you to not accidentally cause a bunch of self-destructive harm to yourself that you’re just going to shame-spiral over later. It also helps you to avoid accidentally over-stepping into controlling behaviours and ruining a friendship. Two external locus of control people with opposing brain types are going to CLASH HARD if they’re both stressed. It’s the cause of many disagreements. It’s also how other people manipulate us into creating a bunch of well-meaning society destabilizing chaos. Get people riled up enough with divisive slogans and social media campaigns and then give them a target and watch the chaos erupt.

The nice part is that nervous system responses are completely and totally changeable. You can choose to replace a destructive response with a more manageable and better adapted response - think, changing from picketing a local farm because they grain feed their cows instead of following some very expensive and complicated feeding procedure that you read about on the internet as being ‘the only way cows MUST be raised so that beef is healthy for all’ because you’re dealing with some health issues thereby causing your own health issues to worsen instead of being able to identify that you’re in a survival response and the actions and behaviours you're taking are actually more harmful to your health rather than helpful because anger and righteous rage FEELS better than sitting in your feelings of sorrow and helplessness at home taking care of yourself properly. Learning to recognize that urge to control someone else’s choices as a nervous system activation and instead going and doing calming activities like going for a walk in nature instead is where you have the most control over your health. In other words - are your stress responses actually lined up with the goals and values you espouse? Do you believe in personal choice but you’re calling for book bans and restrictions on others’ personal freedoms? You’re in an external locus of control survival response. You’re gonna feel really weird about it when you come out of it, I promise you. Do you say you want more motivation and energy to get things accomplished but you’re surviving on coffee and cigarettes and can’t get off the sofa? You’re an internal locus of control person in a survival response. You’re gonna wind up hospitalized for anorexia or a mental breakdown.

Starting to make sense?

Nervous System Responses - Severity of Stressor

How to tell whether or not you’re in a relaxed state, a stress response, or a survival response can be a bit tricky for people at first, but your general feelings and behaviours are the keys for figuring it out.

Do you feel calm, relaxed, happy, and generally looking forward to fun activities with friends and loved ones? Great news! You’re in a relaxed state.

Do you feel agitated, frustrated, annoyed, judgey, confused, unhappy, low motivation, struggling with procrastination? Or! Are you feeling excited, nervous, hopeful, productive, focused? You’re in your stress response. Stress responses can be either good or bad feelings - what we term eustress, or the ‘good stress’, versus destress, the thing is that both are forms of activation of your stress response - it’s the degree of intensity of them that tells you whether or not it’s a stress response. This is why a lot of people confuse a productive, energized state as their ‘rest and relax’ response. Whether or not you have a positive or negative emotional experience of your stress response becoming engaged has to do with the degree of control you feel you have over your preferred locus. Have a giant to-do list but you’re an internal locus of control person? Great! You’re going to get a dopamine hit from crossing things off your list. That normally helps you manage your levels of stress. You’re going to feel incredibly productive and proud of yourself for accomplishing your tasks. Which is all fine and great as long as your stressors remain only as severe as normal stress response level, or you remain healthy enough to use your preferred method of dealing with them. What happens if they or you don’t?

When your ability to manage your stress response in your preferred locus is exceeded, or the stressor is novel or severe - you’re going to be shunted to your survival response.

Survival responses are like stress responses but on steroids. Instead of agitation and frustration you feel anger and rage. Instead of low motivation and procrastination, you feel overwhelmed, lethargic, and shut down. Instead of excitement or nervous, you feel anxious or panic. Instead of productive and in control, you are DRIVEN to accomplish and can’t slow down even when injured or exhausted. Again - survival mode is your stress response on steroids.

Unfortunately, most people have been cycling between survival and stress responses for so long they have absolutely no idea what their relax response even feels like. They often mistake the exhaustion portion of their stress response for their relax response. If you just want to stay home and rest, that’s you in the exhaustion phase of a stress response. If you feel calm, happy, capable of and looking forward to fun activities - that’s you in a genuine relaxation response.

This is incredibly important to know because the things that you do to manage any of these states do not work for the others. Meaning, trying to manage a survival response with the things you normally do for a stress response will only make it worse. Going for a walk, eating healthy, spending time with friends - good luck with that. None of that will work. Those are all stress response management things.

Survival responses ONLY respond to one thing - SAFETY. The end. You gotta do what makes you feel absolutely SAFE. Only way to turn off a survival response.

Once you manage that, then you have to do the things that get you out of a stress response and back into a relaxation response - the things that you do when you feel happy and relaxed and safe.

Here’s the trick to stress responses though - the things that get you out of a stress response are the first things that fly out the window in a stress response. As soon as your stress response kicks in, all of those things that you do when you’re feeling good and happy and relaxed are the LAST things you want to do. Unfortunately, they’re also the only things that will drag you out of a stress response.

This is where people often get stuck. They’re great at doing the safety things to turn off a survival response, but then forget to do the stress management things that drag them all the way fully back into their relaxation response, so they wind up just cycling through survival and exhaustion.

Relaxation responses are all about creativity, flow, stability, balance, nature, friends, reading, puzzles, etc. They’re all the things you WISH you had time to do. But, again, here’s the thing - make time for them. You have to force your brain into a relaxed state. It won’t go there willingly.

Here’s why - your brain’s job is to keep you safe, not happy. Know what’s safe? Familiar patterns it knows what to do with. That’s why ANY novel stressor that your brain doesn’t yet know how to handle will immediately have you trying to control either internal or external factors that it DOES know what to do with. The more afraid of that new stressor you are, the more your brain is going to fight you in even acknowledging that it’s the real problem. If you go all the way fully back into a relaxation response, you’re going to have to face the actual stressor. So, instead, your brain wants to keep you safe by cycling through ‘freaking out about known, easy to solve problems’ and ‘recovery from the stress of that’ because that’s easier than having to deal with the things you don’t know how to solve yet.

This is why you can’t logic a stress or survival response. The thing that person is sooooooo convinced is the actual problem isn’t. But being able to acknowledge that IS the issue we need to address. Because the thing that scares the absolute crap out of our brains the MOST are stressors we’ve seen only a few times and don’t know how to handle yet. Our brains will fight tooth and nail to have us repeat familiar patterns; they will lie to us like dogs and convince us that this other thing is the real problem, they will manipulate everyone around us into not questioning it, etc etc.

You can’t logic it. Logic is the absolute enemy of a stress response. If you try, it will attack you because you’re, again, accidentally telling it that you have a different brain type and are therefore now the enemy.

Only safety will do. When a person feels safe enough, and THEN happy and capable enough, that new thing becomes less scary and the brain will chill enough to hear how to handle it. But you have to approach it based on brain type - what THAT brain values, not what YOUR brain values. That’s the key. To learn that, you’ve got to get real curious about how this person in front of you perceives and processes the world, not try to convince them that they should do it YOUR way. They’ll shut you right out.

Types of Stressors

This brings us to indirect versus direct and known versus novel stressors, and then I’m going to bring it all home for you and show you how to put all of these pieces together, I swear. Stick with me just a bit longer.

So, the type of stressor you’re dealing with also changes how you’re most likely to respond not just to it but also to the people and things around you.

Direct stressors - think, like, your boss at work, your spouse, the guy who just cut you off in traffic - that’s something that you can attack directly. Your brain can conceptualize the threat easily. Versus indirect stressors - financial worry, a pandemic, vague body symptoms you can’t make sense of - you can’t attack these with aggression and defeat it with your bare hands. Your brain has to strategize and plan and try to solve a very complex problem without all of the information or skillsets to be able to handle these stressors.

Known versus new or novel stressors - pretty self explanatory. Is this a stress you have previously encountered and learned to solve correctly, versus something you’ve encountered but are still learning to solve correctly, versus something you’ve never encountered before? Interestingly, the brain responds to things you’ve encountered before but haven’t learned how to solve correctly yet with the biggest stress response, followed by new stressors that are clearly a threat, followed by new things that may or may not be a threat yet, followed by known threats you know how to handle.

Here’s the thing about these that’s the important take away - your brain HATES indirect stressors, especially ones it has encountered before but hasn’t learned how to solve correctly yet. The brain likes known stressors that it can directly deal with and conquer. Anything that isn’t that, it will trick you into believing that whatever is actually the problem isn’t and is instead this thing you have control over - something you know how to solve - regardless of whether that’s something internal like food choices or external like the people around you. Think of it like, these economic tariffs yeah? You’ve maybe been in a tight financial spot before but after a few months of stress and worry and cutting back, it solved itself, or maybe you’ve seen your parents worried about money, maybe you’ve never had a problem with money before and this is your first time having to deal with it. If you’ve previously learned financial management skills, your brain will be more likely to want to tackle the issue directly. But, more often, we revert to pre-programmed behaviours we’ve seen other people (most often our parents) do when faced with similar issues. Maybe you’ve seen mom and dad argue about money when you were a kid, and so suddenly you’re arguing with your spouse about money right now instead of meeting with a financial planner and getting the information you need to help you navigate this without worry. Maybe you have no previous experience with it and so your brain is super focused on the knee pain you’ve had off and on for years but now it’s keeping you up at night and you can’t focus on anything else, because your brain DOES know what to do with knee pain. Only, unfortunately, the knee pain won’t be solved until you can address your financial worries. And your brain won’t allow you to even think about your financial worries. Every time you try, it’ll distract you with your knee pain.

See how that works?

This is an important thing to understand. Whenever you feel the need to hyper focus on something else, be it someone else’s behaviour, or the amount of exercise you're doing, or that yard work you haven’t done in 3 years but is now super important to get all done today, or that physical pain you’ve had off and on for years that is now driving you up the wall - you’re in your stress response about something ELSE and your brain is just picking something it knows how to handle to direct attention to rather than the thing actually stressing you out that you don’t know how to handle. This is a vicious circle, however, because by directing all of your attention to this thing you CAN control rather than figuring out how to handle the thing actually stressing you out, that other thing just festers and doesn’t get handled and you get more and more worked up about the thing you have control over until it gets out of hand and you’re yelling at your spouse or family members, or you’re in the ER for that pain they’ve already checked a dozen times, or you’re sneaking fast food and candy bars in your car or haven’t eaten in three days.

Learning how to recognize WHEN you’re doing that and then re-directing yourself to figuring out the thing actually stressing you out is honestly the only fix for that. You know that thing that you haven’t done for 5 months that would take 20 minutes to do but you keep putting off and instead come up with a laundry list of other things that are suddenly more important to do so you couldn’t possibly do that one thing that completing would actually turn off this response so you can have your life and brain back? We often term this ‘procrastination’, but it’s actually just this stress response cycle process. There’s a skill set here though that I’m going to get into in the next post to help you out when you notice yourself doing this.

The other thing to be aware of is you don’t want to become the thing someone else who’s in that state decides to unleash all their pent up stress on, so it’s also important to learn how to recognize when other people are in that state and not poke the bear but instead help guide them out of it. Because people also love to turn indirect threats - financial worry, etc - INTO direct threats they known how to solve by directing all that stress at a ‘safe target’. They’ll blow up at customer service people, parents, co-workers, friends, strangers on the internet, anyone they feel they CAN defeat. You don’t want to accidentally be someone’s safe target. Especially if you’re in your stress response as well, because now that person you just tried to help is a direct target that you can use to directly attack over all the indirect stress in your own life you don’t know how to solve… That’s what leads to friendship and relationship ending blow-ups.

Want to prevent that from happening? Great. In my next post I’ll give you some strategies for how to recognize when you’re in your stress response, and how to make sure you’re addressing the actual cause of it so that you don’t blow up at the people in your life. Depending on how long that post winds up being, I’ll either then go over how to help someone else come out of their own stress response so you can actually help them, or do that in the post after that. I’m genuinely trying to keep these manageable reading lengths.

All clear as mud? It gets easier the more you play with it. I promise. The important take away is to try to recognize your patterns and trace them back to the real beginning. What started the cascade of your brain trying to grab control over something familiar to solve rather than trying to solve the original thing that got you started in your stress cascade? THAT’S the thing to put your focus and attention on. It’s the only thing that stops the spiral. But, for that, we need to learn strategies for managing the stress of dealing with it that aren’t destructive patterns.

Think of it like someone who’s lactose intolerant but the only way they know how to manage any stressor is by eating cheese. So, say something at work happens that they don’t have an easy, ready-made solution for. Our brains hate that. Rather than sit in that uncomfortableness and try to solve this new stress, this individual goes and grabs pizza on their way home for dinner. They then have the usual lactose intolerance symptoms, but instead of making the easy cause-effect connection, they panic about their symptoms. “Why is this happening? I don’t understand what’s causing this? Why do I feel so terrible?” Etc. Etc. They do, in fact, know exactly what’s causing it. That’s the point. Your brain knows exactly how to predict the outcome of lactose intolerance. It knows that it’s self-limiting. You’re going to sit on the toilet for a while. And then it will be over. It does NOT know how to predict the outcome of your work stress. So, it uses the very familiar and known lactose intolerance symptoms to express the underlying stress and panic of the work event. It gives you something known and familiar to hold on to as an outlet for expressing your underlying feelings about the thing you don’t know what to do with yet. This is all fine and good if it’s just an occasional work stress. But if the work event doesn’t magically solve itself and continues, this becomes a nasty cycle. This person winds up in my office genuinely terrified of their symptoms and totally not making the connection to their work stress.

You’d be amazed how often this happens. And how shocked the person is when they finally come back out of their panic and are bewildered by their own behaviour. When I say the brain is sneaky and lies, I mean it. You genuinely can’t see the connection while you’re IN IT. You have to be calmly brought out of that panic state to be able to see it and then I give you strategies and solutions for dealing with the actual thing causing the stress. It takes a bit of practice, but once you get the hang of it, you never have to use cheese (or yelling at your spouse/kids, or binge drinking, or whatever your preferred strategy is that has become problematic) as your coping mechanism again and you can happily handle whatever life throws at you.

Plus! Once you get the hang of it for yourself, it becomes so much easier to recognize it in others, and it becomes second nature to then, instead of coming at them with hostility and aggression and trying to control their emotional responses so that they don’t make you feel unsafe, you’ll be able to sit with them and talk with them calmly about whatever they want to rant about until they feel safe enough to confide in you about what’s actually underlying all of that bluster. Only then can you actually help them.

I’ll talk about that more in the post after the next one. Stick with me.

As always, if you have any question at all, you know where to find me!

’Til next time, Folks!

Navigating Unpredictability

I’ve been trying to think of what might be useful for folks right now, with everything that’s happening in the world at the moment.

People are coming to terms with the fact that the world has changed, and it’s unlikely to go back to the way things were for quite some time and without a lot of heart ache in between. This means that you folks are going to need some slightly different advice from what I gave you during the pandemic.

The thing about a pandemic is, eventually, things generally DO return to some kind of normal. You just have to get through the in between and life mostly regulates.

But witnessing a democratic ally descend into an autocratic chaos of threatening invasion and upending the global order of things, well, that’s something pretty different. It’s the difference between a loved one getting sick but recovering, and a loved one getting sick and dying. Life will just be different now. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a hope of recovery, but the process is going to look different.

We don’t get to go back to the way things were before. Choices other people have made, we now all have to face and live with. There will be far reaching consequences that will be difficult to predict. Some of them, we can plan for and hope they don’t happen, but others…

The human brain doesn’t love living under that kind of uncertainty. So, you’re going to see a lot of different brain types over the next little while and the ways that those brain types cope with uncertainty of this variety. We saw that during the pandemic - the different kinds of Survival Modes and the ways that those modes play out in the people around us. This will be similar, but different. The ways our brains handle a pandemic versus the kind of looming uncertainty of economic hardship and potential invasion by a neighbouring state - again, similar but different.

One thing that always helps brains handle chaos is predictability and understanding cause and effect. So, I’m going to attempt to give people some of that over the next little while. It will help you to navigate the things that will inevitably happen over the next while, regardless of what happens with our neighbours to the south. I’m also going to give you some tips for how to manage your own nervous system reactions right now so that you can make better, fully informed choices rather than be subject to a hijacked evolutionary thought process that’s maladapted for current circumstances.

First up - things that you can do for yourself right now.

1. Create predictability for yourself.

You can’t rely on the world around you to give you a sense of predictability right now, and our brains NEED that to function at their best. You have to establish some routines and stick to them, otherwise your nervous system is going to first go haywire and then shut down.

Being unable to predict cause and effect leads to a nervous system depressed state called ‘learned helplessness’. In military campaigns, they create this effect through a series of attacks designed to cause this state in the people they wish to invade. You’ve likely heard it referred to as ‘shock and awe’. Whether you do that with bombs, general chaos, or online disinformation (propaganda campaigns), the effect on the nervous system is the same. It forces your nervous system into a state where it first freaks out, attacks everyone around you, and then, finally, shuts down and lacks the motivation to do just about anything, especially fight back.

So, how do you fight back during a campaign of chaos meant to get you to destabilize your own country from the inside first and then shut down your nervous system so that you’re easier to invade? Don’t rely on the world around you for a sense a predictability. You have to create it for yourself. So what routines can you create for yourself right now that will decrease rather than increase your nervous system response? Trial and error some things. But start by asking yourself the question - does this make me angry and frustrated or calm and happy? That’s a super easy way to start managing your nervous system right now in a way that makes you harder to manipulate.

2. Learn what you can, to your tolerance level, about what’s happening so you can recognize it when it occurs instead of panicking or falling for it.

Just like with an illness or injury, not knowing what to expect throughout the process can lead to significant anxiety. Once you know what to expect and what to do should it occur, you can calm down and just handle it. The same is true here for this.

Also important - misinformation is rampant right now. The same way that you can’t trust any random health information site or online influencer for disease process information or treatments, the same goes for world events.

That doesn’t mean just watch the news or doom scroll all day looking for the latest updates. It means learn the theory behind what’s happening from actual academics and scholars so that you can recognize things for what they are instead of getting all caught up in the disinformation online about it all.

If something is written or shared in a way to get you all fired up - they’re trying to manipulate you. That in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad, but it can absolutely be a red flag that means you should probably figure out the intentions behind it.

We don’t make good choices from an amped up state. We’re MUCH more easily manipulated when we’re afraid or angry. Remember, brain function goes down 30% in your stress response. Anyone trying to activate your stress response doesn’t want you to THINK about what to do, they want you to act in whatever way they tell you to. So, though having our biases confirmed right now by whatever podcaster or newscast, or social media whatever might FEEL good, it’s just keeping you in a, basically, weaponized state for whoever wants to take advantage of that state and direct you to whatever target they choose. And please believe me when I say this - there are currently active organized campaigns to do just that right now that have been going on for a while. Online misinformation has been rampant for years now. This is, unfortunately, the culmination of some of those campaigns.

So, learn what you can about the current art of modern warfare and how much of it is waged online first these days, but really monitor your own nervous system response when doing so. When you feel yourself getting amped up and reactive - take a break and chill out.

3. Learn about nervous system responses so you can better understand both your and other people’s responses right now.

I’m going to do my best over the next while to help with this one like I did during the pandemic, because it helps to understand the reactions you’re going to see from friends and family during all of this. People react to the same situation in different ways that are evolutionary based and not necessarily helpful or matched to today’s society. Remember during the pandemic and you had a real range of behavioural responses from randomly attacking cars, to yelling at baristas, to denying germs are real? Same idea here. This time will be a bit different because there's a direct threat target to actually be mad at, rather than a pandemic where the actual threat is nebulous and indistinct. That will help many of the responses make a bit more sense, generally. We can appreciate the people who get Big Mad at Donald Trump or Elon Musk (fight response), or the people who get mad at how our political leaders are handling it (indirect fight response), we can understand the people who get really afraid (fear response), we can even understand the people who say we should placate the US and do whatever they demand (fawn response). We’ll also have the people who have less adaptive responses - the denial response (this isn’t happening or won’t happen), the re-direction response (what we should REALLY be worrying about are those damn vaccines), and, my personal favourite, the full-apeshit response (not the clinical term, and self explanatory).

I find this helpful for when evaluating people’s advice and opinions about how things should be handled right now. You’ll notice that the people you feel drawn to listen to probably match your own preferred nervous system response. You’ll also find that this is the root of a lot of tribalism that will occur over the next while. People who have one type of nervous system response really tend to judge other people’s responses and they get Big Mad at each other, especially when one group tries to reason them out of their response.

I’m going to say this as plainly as I can because it’s important - you can’t reason someone out of a nervous system response. They’ll just get mad at you for trying. So it’s important to learn how to recognize when someone is in one and the correct ways to handle it to avoid nasty, overblown confrontations that just get you both further entrenched in your respective responses. This is incredibly important to understand because the way disinformation campaigns work is by getting groups with differing brain types to attack each other to create chaos within a country to destabilize it. If you’re both so amped up that you’re willing to destroy your relationships by arguing why you’re right and they’re wrong because your nervous system is telling you that the only way to survive is by convincing everyone around you to handle this exactly the same way you do… that’s how we wind up with things like huge protests that immobilize the country and demand the overthrowing of the government. The actual bad guys got us to do the work for them. We’ve seen recent examples of how effective it can be. It’s important that we learn how to not fall for it.

The key here to managing both your and theirs is SAFETY. You have to first make yourself feel safe. The end. Whatever that looks like for you. And I’ll talk about ways to do that in my next post. Only once you’ve got a good handle on your own nervous system can you help someone else with theirs. If you come at someone all amped up and they’re also all amped up and your nerves system responses don’t match, you’re just going to end up fighting with each other. I know many of you have experienced this multiple times over the last few years and you walk away bewildered and hurt. It’s ruined friendships.

This is the only way out of that. You have to deactivate people’s nervous system responses FIRST. It’s the only way to help them right now. People who feel safe with you are willing to hear what you have to say about something. Otherwise, they’ll just shut you out and even become more entrenched in their response.

So, what makes you feel safe? And how do you go about making other people feel safe?

We’ll talk about that in my next post.

Until then, do whatever makes you feel the opposite of amped up, is generally a good rule. What would you do for a sick day? You can’t lose with comfy jammies and a show that makes you laugh. It’s a go-to for a reason. Try that before you get into any arguments you can’t take back.

Until next time, Folks!

When Sh*t Hits The Fan

Life is unpredictable. You’re grooving along, everything is going great, and then BAM! The unexpected Awful Thing happens that throws off all of your progress.

It can be tough to get back up when life knocks you down. I know. Sometimes it can take months or years to figure out how to navigate some of life’s twists and turns.

Resiliency is a thing that’s often talked about, but rarely do people teach you how to build it within yourself. It’s often viewed as this mystical thing that some people just have or don’t have rather than the truth that it’s something you can easily train into yourself.

I often talk about nervous system responses and survival mode versus stress response and how to effectively manage them, but that’s only one part of the process. Once you’ve successfully managed your nervous system, then what?

It’s the ‘then what?’ that people tend to struggle with the most after awful life events.

How do you get your motivation back once you’ve recovered? How do you decide what to do now that all of the plans for yourself and your life have changed so dramatically? How can you find joy again when you don’t know what makes you happy anymore? What even IS happiness anyway?

If you’ve been to a show, you know that I talk about a 2 step process for managing your nervous system responses. If you haven’t been to one yet, the next one is happening this upcoming Saturday, June 1st, in Truro. I highly recommend that you come out. Tickets are on Super Sale now, so it’s the BEST time to get yours. If you’re struggling with anything at all, I’m going to teach you how to not only come back from it, but how to thrive BECAUSE of it.

Why this 2 step process that I’m going to teach you is SO IMPORTANT is that it actually helps you to train your resiliency. It takes you from having an external locus of control to an internal one - meaning, your happiness and satisfaction with life are no longer at the whim of the events happening to you and around you. It teaches you how to very quickly bounce back from any set back, any injury, any Awful Thing life can throw at you. How? Because it teaches you a very easy to follow system that you have complete control over, no matter what, for giving yourself everything you need no matter the circumstances. This builds self trust, and self trust is the absolute key to resiliency.

Once your nervous system trusts you that you will always give it what it needs to thrive, then it has no need to panic to get your attention when life is happening. That’s the key to recovering quickly, to maintaining logic and brain capacity, to be able to make decisions, and to maintain focus and motivation while life occurs.

So, what’s one thing you can start to think about now that will help what I’m going to teach you make the most sense quickly?

I want you to think about when the last time you felt overwhelmed by life was. It might be right now. What was the first thing you stopped doing when life happened? I’m willing to bet the very first thing that flew out the window was anything that brought you joy.

The way our Survival Modes work is our brains immediately narrow focus to only the things that keep you alive. Anything else it immediately ignores. But the antidote to overwhelm is joy. So, by cutting out all of the things that bring you joy, you’re accidentally setting yourself up to stay stuck in your Survival Mode response. Stay stuck there long enough and life becomes just a series of awful events that you have to survive with no joy or happiness or fulfilment in between.

One of the easiest and quickest ways to turn off Survival Mode is doing stuff that brings you joy. But, if you’ve been stuck in Survival Mode too long, you won’t know what those things are anymore and it becomes an extra process to rehabilitate that part first. Which is okay. It’s just an extra step, but I can help you with that too.

So, I want you to think of the things that bring you joy. It doesn’t have to be big. It’s often easier if they’re small, quick things you can give yourself repeatedly.

For instance, this weekend, I’m doing a Lobster Roll Food Crawl. Just because it brings me IMMENSE joy to do. Or, I’ll watch cute animal videos on social media. Or scroll Pinterest for dark humour memes that make me laugh and send them to friends I know will appreciate them and laugh with me.

What are some quick easy things you can do right now that would bring you joy?

Be sure to bring that list with you this upcoming Saturday, June 1st to the Truro show and I’ll teach you what to do once you have it. This list is the key to unlocking your motivation, passion, productivity etc etc. It’s also fine if you can’t think of a single thing to put on the list. I can help with that too.

You can get your tickets for the show here:

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/dr-stephanie-the-world-record-tour-tickets-902281025837

Can’t wait to see you all there! You’re not going to want to miss it!

Rethinking Self Care Part 2

Alright, folks! I promised you science in my last post, and so science you shall receive! Are you ready to completely rethink how you’ve been going about self care? Then strap in! We’re going for a ride.

The method I’m going to be teaching you will require a complete rethink about how you organize your life. But not in the ways you’re used to. I’m not talking about time management or some way of setting reminders for yourself or rewarding good behaviour with froofy foot baths etc etc. This is about managing your nervous system. For that, you’ve got to understand how your brain works. It’s not what you’re going to expect.

Our brains are these marvellous Frankenstein’s Monster of evolution. We have different parts that have evolved for very different reasons all kind of mashed together in this barely functional, completely contradictory, totally unreasonable way that honestly, it’s amazing we’ve managed to come so far as a society. It’s like trying to access Facebook on a computer built in the 70’s. We’re actually not at all wired for most of what we ask our brains to do and yet, somehow, it mostly manages. It shouldn’t. But it does. That means each and every one of you is a miracle.

You’ll understand what I mean in a minute.

The first thing you need to understand is that you and your brain have vastly different goals.

We are basically earthworms that grew arms and legs to get us closer to food. That’s how most of our physiology is still arranged. We then developed a system to detect and assess threats to our ability to accomplish that task. We call this thing our brain. This is why our brain nervous system - our central nervous system - is different than our peripheral nervous system (the arms and legs bit), is different from our gut/enteric nervous system (the earthworm bit). And that threat detection system itself has grown and evolved over time, mashing together different areas - the brain stem, the cerebellum, the limbic system, the cortex - to do different functions for the overall threat assessment and management of this whole giant complicated thing. And most of that operates subconsciously, meaning, you don’t have much say in how it runs. It just operates in the background quietly influencing everything you do. You think you run this ship, but nope. You sure don’t.

Consciousness is this poorly understood, difficult to localize, totally nebulous concept that we still haven’t quite pinned down. We’re not sure how it works or why it works, we just know that it’s a thing.

Think of it like a piano player versus the piano. The piano is the brain and body. The piano player is your consciousness. You can have an amazing piano player with a crap piano, and they’ll still be able to play some pretty amazing music. You can have a crap piano player with the best piano in the world, and that’s still going to sound like badly played hot crossed buns.

You with me so far?

So, again, the first thing you need to understand is that you, piano player, might want to do a bunch of stuff, but your piano actually has a separate system all of it’s own with it’s own rules and those rules pretty much run completely counter to what you want. Your goal is to get stuff done. But your brain’s goal is to keep you safe. Often, these two goals conflict, leading to procrastination, which leads to you having to use your stress response to override your brain to get things accomplished. This leads to burnout and, ultimately, you not doing the things, which is what your brain wanted. The more stress response required to overcome your brain, the faster you burn out. And as soon as you give in to the burnout, your brain actually gets a dopamine hit.

Think about that for a second.

Your brain gets rewarded every time you quit doing stuff, because it accomplished its goal of keeping you safe.

I’ll give you a for instance.

You might want to go outside and meet up with friends for a walk. But outside is where the bears are. People are where diseases are. And home is where the food is.

Your brain is hardwired to absolutely fear predators, famine, and disease.

Which one of you - your consciousness or your brain - is going to win that scenario?

The answer to that is actually, ‘it depends’. It depends on how safe you convince your brain that that walk is going to be. The end. That’s what determines how likely it is you’re going to actually make it out of your pyjamas and into the world.

How difficult or easy it is to convince your brain how safe it is is determined by your past experiences, your general hyper-arousal of your nervous system (this is actually based on a number of factors outside of your control including genetic and epigenetic information you inherited from your parents and ancestors), your current stress levels, whether or not you’re trying to avoid a larger stressor (something else you want to get done but your brain has decided that that is actually a bigger threat so the walk seems safer in comparison), etc etc. You get it.

We often blame ourselves for things like procrastination, lack of motivation, mood states, etc., but those things have way more to do with a lot of other factors than us just being lazy. So if nothing else, please quit ever shame spiralling over what you aren’t getting done and instead realize that there are A LOT of WAY more productive things you can do to take control over your nervous system than just sit and feel bad about yourself.

What are those things?

You’re going to have to come to the World Record Tour Event on Saturday, April 20th from 1-5pm at the Mic Mac Amateur Aquatic Club to find that out. I’m not making this THAT easy on you. ;)

The 2 for 1 sale ends this Friday, and they’re half gone already, so make sure to get yours while they’re still cheap and available! This is the ONE show we’re going to be doing in the Halifax area. After that, the only way to get this information is to come for a one-on-one appointment, at a cost of $145 per appointment, for at least 12 appointments. Or try to catch a show in another city. Your call.

You can get your tickets here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dr-stephanie-the-world-record-tour-tickets-876639240567?

See you there?

Till next time, folks!

Rethinking Self Care

I made some pretty bold claims yesterday. And I know, I know, it sounds pretty gimmicky. But I promise you, it’s actually not. This is all just science and rehabilitation medicine. It’s a legitimate field of medicine and research. You just have to have some pretty tragic things happen to you to normally get access to this kind of information. And as humans, we tend to not be great at thinking about things that haven’t happened to us yet.

So, for the record, I’m not going to push a bunch of useless supplements at you or tell you to just think positive thoughts. You’re not going to find any toxic positivity or grift here.

The thing about the method I’m going to be teaching people is that it’s incredibly individual and specific, so it really isn’t very marketable or ‘Brand-able’. If someone is getting into trying to be some health guru, this is definitely not what they’re going to teach people.

Each and every one of you is unique. You all have your own mix of traumas and experiences. Incredibly different things are going to work for different people. What one person finds relieving, another person is going to find incredibly stressful. That’s why this process is best done on an individual, one-on-one basis. It requires a practitioner to really get to know you as a person.

The problem is that this process is typically done over the course of multiple, very expensive appointments. It usually takes at least 12, over the span of a year, at a cost of between $140-$250 an hour, depending on who you go see for it. I charge $145.

What I’ve distilled into a 4 hour seminar, it’s going to take you time on your own to implement. It won’t be easy. There are no quick fixes in rehabilitation. You’re going to have to be dedicated to your own self care in a way that most people are incapable of unless it becomes a necessity. And so very frequently, as soon as people get themselves back to a good place, they immediately forget all of the things that got them there, stop doing them, and backslide. It takes commitment and dedication to make it a lifelong change, like any other lifestyle medicine.

But! It does work.

Think of it like how diet and exercise are really the foundational keys to healthy weight management. There are all kinds of gimmicks and fads, but it really does come down to some basic fundamentals. This is the same. Only no one has really taught these basic fundamentals before on a large-scale basis because it’s such a niche group of people who generally ever really need them that so few people specialize in this kind of a field of study.

Like I said, usually people use them long enough to get back to a good place and then quit using them. I just happen to have the kind of injuries combined with a very physically demanding job that means that I’m locked in for life. Because of that, I just haven’t quit using them. And because of THAT, I got interested in seeing what else I could do. Could these things, used when a person is mostly healthy, make a functional difference in the person’s life?

You’ll have to ask my patients about that, but there’s a reason I have such die-hard followers.

Now, to be clear, this will be the first time ever that a program like this is being attempted at scale. It may or may not work. It’s definitely going to be a bit of an experiment. I have no idea if it’s going to work, and there’s going to be A LOT of learning and troubleshooting as the tour progresses, but I’m certainly game to try if you are?

To that end, I’m going to be setting up some things over the next bit to help people, like Facebook groups and the like, so that as I do this tour, there are resources to help people actually troubleshoot and implement the changes that I’m going to be teaching you over time. Because I actually do genuinely believe in making this kind of care easily accessible to people. So, I know the cost of the seminars seems a bit steep upfront, but when you realize that it’s actually saving you about $1600-$2800, you’ll see why I’m so excited to get to teach this to people.

My promotions and marketing team are going to love that I’m publishing this, but, from an informed consent and ethical standpoint, it’s more important to me that you guys know what you’re signing up for. You all get to choose your treatment. My job is to inform you of the options and then help you figure out the best ways to implement them for you. I’m not here to tell you that you have to do something ONLY this one specific way blah blah. That’s not healthcare. That’s ego and a lack of respect of other peoples’ autonomy.

But I digress…

For me, all of this is important to making sure that as I go forward, we go forward together, the RIGHT way. It’s the reason I have the team of people helping with this that I do. They may not always understand why I have to do things a certain way, but they support and respect me in my authority over myself to make those decisions. Which is the way healthcare should be. So, it’s important to me that I’m setting all of this up in a way that does that for all of you too.

Again, we’ll likely have to trial and error some of it along the way, but we’ll figure it out.

So, all of that disclaimer stuff said, let’s talk about some key pieces of information each of you will want some time to figure out before the events - what do you love to do, and what makes you feel safe?

You just need one example for each, and often it’s actually one combined thing, but if you have more, write them down too.

I’m going to explain why. It will help this begin to make sense.

First - we have a tendency as humans to focus on all of the things we don’t have, the things we can’t do anymore, or the things we never could do. These things stress us out and make us feel unsafe. A foundational tenet of rehabilitation is start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. Focus on what you STILL have, what you’re good at, what you CAN do, and then work to expand that list.

We’re going to be applying that same principle many, many times over the course of our work together. It’s going to be the thing that we come back to over and over and over.

Why I want you all to start thinking about it NOW is that every single time when I ask a new patient this question, I get the same 3 self care answers that everyone thinks is true for them but isn’t. ‘I love to go for walks on the beach, or reading a good book, or taking a long bath.’ And I apologize to those who genuinely DO love those things, but when was the last time you actually did them? If that was actually the thing you really loved to do, you’d be doing it way more often. They would be the things you forced yourself out of bed for, MADE time for when everything else was falling apart, did even though they are starting to cause you physical pain, etc.

So, I’ll pose the question another way - what’s the thing you NEED to do when the world stops making sense? When the shit hits the fan and you need time to yourself to get your head right? What’s that thing that brings you back down? Is it scrubbing the bathroom? Cooking? Knitting? Organizing? Working on your car or motorcycle? Video games?

What gives you back a sense of control?

THAT is the thing that makes your nervous system feel safe. That’s what I mean by that thing you LOVE to do. You won’t even think of those things because they are so ingrained and such habitual things that they will absolutely not be the first thing you answer that question with. Because you don’t think of them that way. We overlook the things we’re actually good at and do all the time. We dismiss them as just ‘being that thing we do’, because we do them. Our brains covet what we DON’T have or do, remember. We put way more value in something we don’t know how to do than the stuff we do offhand. But I need you to think about all of those things now, because all of those things are the things that are the keys to taking control of your nervous system and learning how to manipulate it into a parasympathetic state at will.

That’s why all of those ‘self care’ things people tout all the time feel like extra work and you wind up not actually doing them. They’re not the go-to things your nervous system has been using for years to induce a parasympathetic response. Those things you do automatically without even considering what they’re doing for you.

This is what I mean by this is a very individual process. All of you are going to have different answers for this. And that’s a good thing. I want you to embrace that uniqueness. I don’t want the answers you think you SHOULD want. I want the real ones. You don’t even have to say them out loud. I just need you to know what they are.

So, start paying attention over the next few days. What do you do when you get home from a stressful day at work to transition to home life? THAT’S the thing that brings your nervous system back down.

For me, it’s putting away groceries. The number of times I’ll stop for stuff at the store we absolutely don’t need just so I have groceries to put away is ridiculous. And no one is allowed to help me do it. If I come home with groceries, Alan knows to leave me to it and I’ll let him know when I’m done.

So, think about it like that. What’s YOUR thing? What gives you back a sense of control over your existence?

My next post will explain why this thing is important and what it’s doing for you, so you can understand why it’s the key to this whole thing.

You can put your answer in the comments for this post, or just keep it to yourself and be sure to bring it with you on April 20th to find out what to do with it now that you have it.

You can get your tickets for the event here:

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/dr-stephanie-the-world-record-tour-tickets-876639240567

I’m really looking forward to helping all of you learn how to take control over your nervous system responses. No matter what, knowing this bit of information alone will help you in so, so many ways. Again, I’ll explain why in my next post. So stay tuned!

Till next time, folks!

The World Record Tour and Why You Should Come

“I’m just so exhausted all the time.”

“I would love to try to learn something new, but I don’t have time.”

“I’m so overwhelmed, I don’t know how to fit self care into my day.”

I hear this from so many patients when they first come to see me. It’s a trap so many of us have fallen into.

When I was first asked to do the Tour, my instinct was to say no. I’m not interested in just blabbering on about myself for hours. But then the person who asked me about it said, “if there was one thing that you could use this opportunity to teach people, what would it be?” And that got me. I had a giant opportunity to design something that would help a lot of people.

Y’all know how much I love to do that.

So, we’ve been working really hard to create a reliable, easy to learn way to distill a process that I normally take my patients through, that teaches them how to activate their parasympathetic system for healing, but instead we’ve focused on teaching folks how to use it for productivity rather than their sympathetic system.

I’m about to drop just a whole BUNCH of science. Stay with me.

The first thing you learn when you have a brain injury is that stress makes everything worse. Our stress response decreases our brain’s capacity, function and efficiency by 30%. The other thing about our stress response is that absolutely zero tissue healing occurs when we’re using it. None. Tissue healing ONLY occurs in our parasympathetic response - our ‘rest and recovery’ response.

The problem is that most people use their stress response for being productive.

We don’t think of it as our stress response, because we equate stress with the emotional experience of stress, and forget that our stress response is used for pretty much everything.

We typically break ‘stress’ up into ‘good stress’ and ‘bad stress’, or eustress and distress, but here’s the thing - it’s both the same stress response. The difference is whether or not we perceive the outcome of that response to be good or bad. For example, exercise is considered a ‘good stress’. We get a lot of health benefits from exercise. However, it still uses your stress response. The same stress response that happens when you have a huge deadline looming at work.

The problem with using your stress response for productivity is that you always need a recovery time after its use. Always. No exceptions. Because tissue healing only occurs when your stress response is turned off.

That’s why over-exercising leads to injuries. It’s why you feel so exhausted and burned out after a productive day. Your body needs to repair all the micro-damage that occurred from that productivity and replenish energy stores. Without adequate rest in between bouts of productivity, you burn out. That’s your body saying, ‘hold up, we can’t let you go any further until we heal some of this first.’

Normally, we can get away with this. We can take a weekend and recover, or take a vacation. We add in ‘self care’ exercises like meditation and yoga. We try to balance the time we spend in sympathetics versus parasympathetics, and that usually manages the problem.

But what if you get injured? And I’m not talking a broken leg kind of injury. You break a leg, you take a few months off, you heal and recover and fine. I’m talking the kind of injury it will take decades to fully recover from. Or the kind of illness that requires a total life overhaul.

The first thing you learn when you have that kind of injury or illness is that the world doesn’t stop for you. You still have to pay bills, your mortgage, you need an income, and groceries. You need to clean your house, and bathe and brush your teeth. You have to make it to doctors appointments and physio and specialists, etc. etc., you get the point.

Where your body once had a built in wiggle room for recovery, now there isn’t one. Everything you do makes you that much more tired, that much more burnt out, and that much worse, because your body already has this massive backlog of healing it just can’t get through.

That’s the kind of situation so many of my patients are in when they first come to see me. Because we’ve all been taught that the only way to be productive is to use your stress response system. Even those in healthcare and rehabilitation fields will work from a place of trying to balance the two systems instead of realizing that when you have the kind of injuries that will take decades to repair, not months or years, you can’t possibly win that game if you keep playing it the same way.

When I had my accident, I had the kinds of injuries where your recovery is measured in decades, not years. I very quickly learned that if I didn’t figure out how to use my parasympathetic system for the majority of my day, I wasn’t going to make it.

The problem is, most people only use their parasympathetics for recovery and stress relief. They think about it as ‘self care’ activities and so trying to fit in all of these soothing, distracting, non-productive things to manage their stress levels just makes them more stressed out because now they have to try to make up that productive time.

With a brain injury, everything takes you SO MUCH LONGER to accomplish. Even now, my preparations for things start months to years before I’m going to need to be functionally competent at something. The amount of effort, time, commitment, practice, planning, training, that goes in to me being functional daily… There is no way I could pull off any piece of my life if I still used my stress response for productivity. It’s just impossible.

The reason my patients make the kinds of miraculous recoveries they do is because I teach them all how to do this. I don’t always lay it out like that, and it’s always tailored to the individual’s need. But, at its heart, I teach people how to harness their parasympathetic system and use it for healing.

What I’m going to do during my World Record Tour events is teach you how to harness it for productivity.

Why that’s important - imagine that instead of getting through your day, you still have all kinds of energy because instead of your body breaking down and needing to repair, your body spent the entire day healing and repairing, you still got everything done, you didn’t lose an ounce of brain capacity, and you still have hours left to accomplish more. What would you do with your time if you didn’t need to use it for rest and repair? What could you accomplish over a month if you had an extra 2 hours every day? 4 hours? 7? Now expand that out over a year, 5 years, 10 years… What could you get done in that amount of extra time?

And! You’re not only not exhausted, but stronger, healthier, happier, smarter…

What if your life didn’t steal from you and only gave instead?

What could you do? What could you accomplish?

Want to find out?

Join me Saturday, April 20th from 1-5pm at the Mic Mac Amateur Aquatic Club for the start of my World Record Tour and begin your own journey to the kind of life you’ve only dreamed of.

Let me show you how to get there.

You can get your tickets here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dr-stephanie-the-world-record-tour-tickets-876639240567?aff=oddtdtcreator

Til next time, folks!

Whoops... I accidentally did a thing.

I have to tell you a secret.

Now, I still feel pretty weird about this, so I’m going to ask you to just keep it between us for now.

I just became the most credentialed woman in the world.

IN. THE. WORLD.

Like, on the entire planet.

I didn’t actually mean to do that and I still cringe internally every time I think about it.

I wasn’t trying to ‘do a thing’ with this. I take courses and do degrees on the side constantly because it helps to keep my brain active and healthy.

You see, I was in a really bad car accident at the end of my first year of University. I suffered a brain injury in the accident. I had to relearn how to read, to speak, to do math (I’m still working on that one). So, one way that I keep my brain healthy and active is to constantly be learning new things. I don’t do it so people will be impressed. Most of the time I don’t tell anyone about it.

I have over 20 degrees now.

I still feel super weird saying that. But I don’t plan on stopping. It’s just a thing I do. Let’s not dwell on it.

It wasn’t until I finished my second recent PhD (I’m doing this thing where I’m trying to earn 8 PhD’s because in one of the Thor movies Bruce Banner offhandedly commented that he had 7, which is different from the cannon, but either way, I just want to be able to say I beat an Avenger in real life) that a friend asked how many degrees I was at now and I counted. She did some googling and, welp… whoops. I accidentally did a thing.

I wasn’t going to say anything about it, because, well, Nova Scotia can be a really hard place to be an accomplished woman, let’s be honest. There are very few resources for women, especially for women entrepreneurs and Goddamn if the competition isn’t awful amongst women out here. They can be just so, so mean. They will cut you down…

Putting this out there just felt like it would invite in a lot of terrible that I just don’t want to have to deal with.

But I had a conversation recently with a friend that changed my mind about it.

It hasn’t been that long since women were even allowed to go to school.

It was only 1945 when Harvard Medical School admitted women for the first time. A number of schools followed suit over the next bunch of years, but it was only 1980 when women and men were enrolled in equal numbers in colleges in the US.

There are large parts of the world where women still struggle to access education.

So, okay. This actually IS a big deal and I shouldn’t feel weird about feeling weird about it. It’s important to talk about it. It’s important to honour the women who have fought for me to be able to achieve this. Especially because the rights of women are, once again, unfortunately, being eroded worldwide.

It’s important that we protect the ability of women to follow in my footsteps. I don’t want to be the woman with the most degrees in the world forever. I want many, many women to be able to get many, many more than I have.

After all, a good mentor, teacher, and leader should expect that the people they’re mentoring, teaching, and leading will surpass them.

This is the first time in my lifetime that I’m actually worried that that might not happen.

To be clear, I’m not trying to be a leader in this. If you know me, you’ll know that has never been my intention. It’s just something I do because I love it. But now that I have realized that I accidentally am, I know that that comes with a responsibility to ensure that future generations can follow my example.

So, for the sake of every current and future woman, I hope that we take a good hard look at what’s happening in the world and choose to reject following it. I hope that we protect women’s rights and make choices that allow women to achieve whatever they choose, however they choose to achieve it. We need to continue to support, nurture, and help women in ways that don’t lead to this terrible in-fighting and awfulness that really just sets us all back. More resources are necessary.

I mean, come on. You don’t want ME to be the pinnacle of womankind’s educational achievement. That would be just so, so very sad.

Help me make sure that doesn’t happen?

I’m not sure what needs to be created or improved, again, this is a new thing that I unintentionally did. But let's workshop it together? What are your ideas for improving support for women’s education both locally and globally?

Reach out and tell me your ideas!

Sooo... We Should Probably Talk About Unified Health

I saw that we were in the news again the other day.

And by ‘saw’ I mean that 5 people sent me the article asking me how I felt about the media still mischaracterizing that project.

If I had to sum up my feelings about the way the media continually choose to misrepresent everything that Unified was and is, it would just be a sigh.

It is a choice to misrepresent the selfless courage of a Nurse Practitioner (NP) who chose to stand in defiance and protest against the province at a time when they were refusing to let NPs operate independently and refused to pay for them - during a doctor shortage.

It’s not the choice I would make, but it’s still a choice.

Let me ask you - if you have an on-going healthcare crisis whereby you don’t have enough family doctors but you do have a bunch of NPs willing to step into that role and help out, do you hamstring them by making them physically have to work in the same building as an MD to be paid by the public healthcare system? Or, do you encourage them to set up their own independent practices, with pay, so that they can work in areas where there aren’t enough family doctors to ‘supervise them’?

And if you live in a province where the healthcare system is refusing to allow NPs to operate independently and pay them through the publicly funded system, do you a) start crying about privatization if someone starts working independently in open defiance to force the province into changing their stupid stance or do you b) support and encourage them because you know that that’s going to help save a lot of peoples’ lives and instead focus your ire on the people who make the rules and harass them into changing said rules so that it’s no longer a privatization issue?

The media continually makes their choice there. And it’s not to the benefit of Nova Scotians.

For the record - we won that fight.

We won that fight because Nova Scotians demanded it.

So thank you to everyone who called MPs and MLAs, who came to the clinic in support of the practitioners, and everyone who stuck up for us and all NPs during that time.

But that’s not what bothers me about being called a ‘private medical clinic’. It bothers me that everything that that project was continually gets reduced to something so antagonistic to what it was really about.

Unified started as my thesis project for my osteopathic degree - it coordinated research from clinics across 8 Canadian provinces - and snowballed into a masters, 3 PhD’s and a Doctorate, which I am still completing (I’ll be finishing them all within the year!). It has also birthed a whole bunch of other research projects with various organizations outside of academia. It has led to independent NP-led medical clinics that are paid for by the province, the implementation of community care centres, health navigators, even province-paid spiritual counsellors at long-term care facilities.

To distill everything that this project was and has become into ‘that private medical clinic’ is, quite frankly, insulting. Especially given that where it began had everything to do with trying to add MORE services to the public healthcare system - NPs, osteopathy, counselling, nutrition services, massage, acupuncture, etc., so that people who can’t afford these services and suffer with chronic pain and illness can still access them through the public system rather than having to pay out of pocket.

That’s it. That was the project. To come up with a model, regulations, standards of practice, objective ways to measure both treatment success and practitioner competency, etc, etc, etc., that would allow for these services to be properly integrated into the Canadian healthcare system.

I graduated at the top of my class for the project, in case you were wondering how that turned out.

Where we ran into trouble - and the ensuing ‘private medical clinic’ debacle - was that we decided that, since we were already going to have this clinic full of medical and complementary medicine services for the research project, we might as well try to help out during the doctor shortage crisis and offer our services to the public. So, we designed a side project for the province and hospitals to see if we could help reduce wait times by ‘pre-triaging’ non-emergency cases - things like back pain, mental health issues that weren’t yet a crisis situation, whatever was clogging ERs and doctors’ offices that would be better served by being directed to the appropriate community resources and care. We had the NP on staff already to oversee the school project, so they would be able to judge if something was truly an emergency and needed the ER, or it could be dealt with in-house at one of the participating clinics. If you needed the ER, since you were pre-triaged at the clinic, we just made a phone call and you got to skip the triage part at the hospital.

The problem came in that, just before we were all set to open, the media frenzy started. The province quickly changed their tune and refused to allow our NP to practice in that capacity since we didn’t have an MD to oversee her.

Again - remember, doctor shortage. A main point of the original project was to prove that NPs roles could be expanded and they didn’t need that supervision.

They eventually caved and allowed her to do her job, but they refused to cover her pay.

We were already a few weeks away from opening, so the only way that people could access her services were if they paid out of pocket.

We eventually got all of that changed and now NPs can operate their own independent clinics, but the damage was done. We became forever known as ‘that private medical clinic’ instead of all of the other things that we were. It didn’t matter how much we tried to explain the actual project. We spoke to the media, did interviews, made videos - once that label was there, there was no getting rid of it.

Even now, years later, we are still referred to by the media as ‘that private medical clinic’ even though NPs are now covered by the publicly funded system, so it would no longer be a private medical clinic if it were still open. Which it isn’t. We closed at the end of my thesis when the NP moved back to Alberta.

But, I can’t be all that mad about it, to be perfectly honest. All of that international attention and political hubbub actually led me to some pretty exciting national and international collaborations.

So thank you, media, for your continued attention.

The success of Unified and everything it has grown into is really a direct result of your ridiculousness.

Nova Scotia, the country, and even the world will still benefit from the knowledge gained by that project, even if, because of you, it was so much harder than it had to be and took so much longer to actually implement some of the findings from it than it would have otherwise. And yes, NDP - I’m looking at you too when I say this. You chose to actively attack a Metis woman led school project that was trying to bring more services into the public domain just to score cheap political points because of who I choose to volunteer my time with. It was a super low move. You failed a lot of Nova Scotians by doing so. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.

My advice? This new ‘private medical clinic’ in Dartmouth that is actually a group of family practice nurses wouldn’t be a ‘private clinic’ if the province decided to pay them for their services as well.

It’s not a new thing. Other provinces cover the costs for those kinds of services under their provincial healthcare plans.

Maybe it’s time Nova Scotia decided to demand creative solutions to the doctor shortage problem by covering the services of other providers who are capable and qualified to address certain patient concerns instead of crying ‘privatization - how dare they?’ every time those providers are forced to offer their services to the public for a fee instead.

Healthcare providers stepping up and trying to help out in a crisis is literally what they do. It’s time the government supported them in those efforts and ensured that our public healthcare system remains public by paying them for those efforts instead of villainizing them.

After all, it was brave NPs who decided to step up and offer their services for a fee instead of waiting for the province that forced the government to then cover those services to protect our public system. Think about where we would be right now if that hadn’t happened.

So good for you, Family Practice Nurses, for stepping up in a crisis and deciding not to wait for the government. You get out there and force their hand! And Nova Scotia - do what you do! Get outraged! Complain! Make some noise! Just make sure you’re directing it at the right people by supporting these brave nurses’ efforts by calling on the government to change the rules so that these services can be covered by the public system.

Hope this helps clear up any confusion about where I stand on the matter.

If anyone has any questions about that project, or any of my many other on-going projects, feel free to reach out and ask! I love questions!

Til next time, Folks!

Cholera of the air

Did you know that most cholera infections are asymptomatic? 

Only about 10% of people will develop severe illness from cholera, and even then it is completely survivable if you have access to clean drinking water. And yet, we changed our entire water and waste management systems to eradicate this disease.

Not dumping our poop into the same water we drink from seems like a smart idea now, but did you know that there was a time when people actually fought against these protective health measures? There were actual riots. 

In fact, history is punctuated with disease and those who fought against their eradication. The recent ebola outbreaks are a great example of this. Eradication efforts are constantly hampered by misinformation, conspiracy theories, and suspicion of medical staff just doing their best to keep people alive. Basically, anytime you have disease, suspicion of science, medicine, and efforts to fight against them arise. And every time, when the dust settles, those folks look real silly. 

I haven’t wanted to write this post because, well, I am not an expert in public health policy and so figured it was something better left to them to do. However, I have not seen much written about it throughout this pandemic and I feel like it’s very important contextual information for people to have. 

I do have a background in public health policy, I would like to clarify, so writing this isn’t entirely outside of my wheelhouse. I have both studied it and worked in the field, and still contribute as a consultant from time to time, but it’s not my specific job at the moment. 

So, with that disclaimer out of the way, I want to try to alleviate some of the confusion I’ve been seeing and hearing around the interplay between public health policy and government functioning. I know that a lot of you have been feeling uneasy. It’s hard not to. With our media and social media constantly shouting about ‘draconian health measures’ and ‘authoritarianism’, without the proper context and background as to why they’re actually very much not, it can be easy to feel like our country is sliding into chaos. 

It’s not. At least not as far as these things go, anyway. 

So, let’s take a look at why your freedoms aren’t actually at risk and nothing is actually being taken away from you, from a public health perspective. 

There will come a time where we view breathing the same air in that other people exhaled out just as weird and gross as we view drinking the same water we dump our poop into now. Covid is just the cholera of the air. It will eventually force us to rethink our air management and filtration systems and all of this hoopla will seem real silly to future generations who study this period of time in school. 

Public health policy has been around since the first quarantines began in the 1300’s. Surprise! Quarantines, lockdowns, public health mandates - all of these things have been used to control the spread of infectious disease for centuries. None of what is happening is new. New to you maybe, since vaccines and other medical advancements like antibiotics have either eradicated or made many infectious diseases not such a big deal, so you’ve likely never really had to deal with things like quarantine in your lifetime, but there are still plenty of diseases that are effectively managed by these types of public health measures. 

Want a popular culture ‘for instance’? The mumps episode of Brooklyn 99 where Captain Holt and Jake Peralta catch the mumps and have to quarantine in Captain Holt’s house together for 9 days while they’re still infectious. The gym where they caught it was locked down too, the patrons contact traced, tested, and quarantined. Sound familiar? 

That episode aired on January 19, 2016 - long before the pandemic. 

Mumps, you’ll be interested to note, is an illness that we have vaccine mandates for as well that help to control its spread, but there are still sometimes ‘breakthrough cases’ and outbreaks of it because never has a vaccine protected you 100% from becoming infected, immunity wanes over time, and we all need boosters for it periodically. The difference is that we receive those vaccines when we’re kids so most of you don’t remember the mandated part, but almost all schools require that you’re vaccinated for it to be able to attend. You have to show proof of that vaccination or proof of exemption too (*cough cough - vaccine passport). The mumps vaccine is administered as a 2 dose regime in childhood. 

Here’s an infographic explaining the routine childhood vaccines - notice how many require multiple doses. 

Source: CDC

The covid vaccine is a multiple dose regime, like the multitude of vaccines that came before it, i.e., HepB and Polio. Want an interesting bit of knowledge? The DTaP vaccine requires (gasp) 5 doses. Multiple dose vaccines are not weird but rather the norm. 

But I digress. This post is about freedoms and how yours aren’t actually, in any way, being taken away. Because public health policy has been around for a very, very long time. Because transmittable diseases have been around for a very, very long time. All of the things we’re experiencing now with covid, have been experienced before for all of the other diseases that came before it that we now have vaccines and treatments for. Our societies are all still here, our democracy still very much intact. This, too, will just become a footnote in history and life will carry on. 

Vaccines help to keep those diseases from disrupting society now, but there was a time when society was quite disrupted by those diseases. Before vaccines, the other public health measures like quarantines, lockdowns, travel restrictions, social distancing, masks, contact tracing, etc., were how we controlled diseases. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years. They are still used to this day for diseases we don’t have vaccines for. We also have travel restrictions and vaccine mandates for all kinds of places where certain diseases are still rampant. Ever travel somewhere and have had to get certain vaccines before you go? Those things all had to start somewhere. We’ve been through all of these processes before. None of this is new - it’s taught in schools, people have careers in it - it’s just maybe new to you because you haven’t had to live through a pandemic before and so haven’t paid much attention to all of the ways public health measures keep you safe in your daily life. 

How are these public health measures able to exist? Because of the way our Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms is set up. 

This is such an important thing for Canadians to understand so I’m going to put this in bold:

We are not America. 

We do not have first amendment rights or free speech or the right to bear arms. 

The rights and freedoms set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are not absolute but rather can be limited to protect other rights or important national values. Section 1 of the Charter says that Charter Rights can be limited by law so long as those limits can be shown to be reasonable in a free and democratic society. For example, freedom of expression (not ‘free speech’ or ‘first amendment rights’, that’s American) may be limited by laws against hate propaganda or child pornography.

That’s why public health rules, mandates, and laws are able to function the way they do and not infringe on our Charter Rights. They have to be shown to be reasonable limits, of course, which is why certain proposed ideas - like the health tax on unvaccinated individuals - haven’t gone forward, but other ones - like the short term restricting of access of unvaccinated individuals during a global pandemic can only occur for non-essential activities, but not essential ones - are okay. It is a reasonable limit on your rights and freedoms given the circumstances. This comes with a huge caveat - there are specifics to these rules that make them reasonable versus not - their time-limited nature, the amount of disease prevalence, percentage of population vaccinated, alternatives for the unvaccinated to participate in essential services and activities (like working from home, wearing a mask and testing frequently, etc). All of these things are worked out with the Human Rights Commission of Canada, the various government levels and departments, and the court system to ensure that these limits are, in fact, reasonable. And sometimes they change over time. 

And for the record, I get it - when you don’t have the context or the background in public health measures, constitutional law, or how our government system functions, some of these measures can seem like over-reach. There are, of course, nuances that would make them over-reach. If, say, a government were to exclude a group of individuals based on their ethnicity - something they can’t change about themselves - then yeah, totally, go protest the heck right out of that! If there was no disease and the government just decided to restrict your access to things - total problem right there. Maybe. 

Let’s talk about seatbelts and not smoking in public spaces - both non-disease public health measures that limit your freedoms and have become laws because they did so in reasonable ways. The first one, seatbelts, was found to be a reasonable restriction because the scientific evidence says that they reduce the risk to the individual should that individual get into a car accident. Not smoking in public spaces was found to be reasonable because, though it may infringe on your right to smoke wherever you want, the scientific evidence says that your choice to smoke can harm the other people around you. You still have the right to smoke, but you do not have the right to endanger other people with your choice, so the reasonable limit on your freedom is to designate smoking areas that are far enough away from other people so as to not impact them negatively. 

See how that works? Individual freedoms have to be balanced by the freedoms of those around you to not be negatively impacted by your choices. 

You haven’t been free to spread a deadly disease for a very long time because it negatively impacts on the freedoms of those around you to not be exposed to a deadly disease. In some instances, knowingly spreading a deadly disease to others without their consent is actually illegal.

The laws that public health operates under have been around for a very long time. They actually pre-date the formation of this country. Again - there are entire professions dedicated to making decisions around infectious disease. If you’re truly interested in this stuff, take a course in it, go back to school, get a degree, work in the field. Your uneducated opinion is just that - an uneducated opinion. It does not change an entire field of research and policy. Nor should it. No matter how angry you may be at the inconvenience you feel having to do your part to stop the spread of a dangerous disease, your opinion on it doesn’t actually make public health rules null and void. Just be thankful we stopped shipping infectious people off to islands, i.e., leper colonies and during plagues. You having to wear a mask and wash your hands is actually pretty tame in comparison. 

But I digress. 

Here is a brief historical overview: 

There’s actually a lot of biblical mentions about isolation and quarantine, but I’m not going to start there because dates are hard to pin down. So we begin our journey in the 1300’s with the European plague epidemic known as ‘the Black Death’ of 1347–1352 (it actually continued for like, 350 some years) that began in Italy, arriving on ships with rats, sailors and cargo, and spread to France, Spain, Austria, and central Europe. Since medicines to treat plague didn’t exist yet, the only option to prevent infection was to isolate the sick from the healthy and avoid contaminated objects. City-states began to impose restrictions on strangers entering the cities. ‘Sanitary Cordons’ were imposed by armed guards along trade routes and at access points to the city. Breaking it was punishable by death. Infected people were initially held in makeshift camps outside the city, but later (1377) these developed into ‘lazarettos’, or plague hospitals. These were located far enough away from cities to restrict the spread of disease but close enough to still transport the sick. Often, these hospitals were placed in areas where a natural barrier - like the sea or a river - separated them from the city (i.e., islands), but in areas where that wasn’t possible the hospital was surrounded by a moat or a ditch. In port cities, buildings were designated as quarantine zones and were used to house incoming passengers, crew, and cargo. The people working to intake these potentially infected individuals worked from behind glass barriers to stop the spread of ‘bad air’. They maintained a good deal of physical distance between themselves and others. Sound familiar? 1300’s. Before we even knew that microorganisms existed because the microscope hadn’t been invented yet. Because these measures actually helped to limit spread of disease even when we didn’t know yet how it was spread. 

During this time, in addition to these measures to stop plague from travelling into cities from outside, measures were enacted to stop the spread within cities as well. Anyone deemed to be infected were confined to their homes, often under guard to ensure they did not leave. In some places, the sick were actually walled up inside their homes and left to die. Also interesting to note that the length of quarantines back then were 40 days and nights, likely a biblical reference, and this standard was maintained for over 300 years. Doubly interesting - plague has a disease course of 37 days, so the 40 days was actually pretty perfect. 

Let’s fast forward a bit, because though many diseases sprung up during this time, the measures to contain them didn’t change much. I want to note that quarantine and isolation measures were first introduced to North America in New York and Boston in 1688 and 1691, respectively, to try to contain outbreaks of Yellow Fever. Under the new legislation, which was the responsibility of the individual states, people could be mandated to remain at home for 40 days if they were suspected of being infected. 

Just want to take a moment here to point out that legislation around quarantines and isolation were introduced to what is now Canada in 1791 in a ‘British colony’ that is now the Province of Ontario. So when I say that you are not losing any freedoms here - you never had them. Some of these laws have been here since before Canada was even Canada. This is why, to someone who has a knowledge of public health history, all these protests and calls for your ‘freedoms’ to be returned to you are just… a part of the process. You’ll understand in a minute. But you didn’t lose anything. In fact, laws have been enacted around these original laws to limit their sweeping powers because the French Revolution happened and we began to recognize the rights of the person. Our laws around all of this did not begin with the rights of the person. They began with the rights of the people in the colony to be protected from the infected individual. 

It may seem like a small distinction, but it is an important one. Your individual rights do not supersede the rights of others here. You are granted certain freedoms only as long as those freedoms don’t infringe on the rights of others. From the very beginning of our country. You may not like that, but the law says that you need to respect that, otherwise you face consequences. When some new disease comes along, it may seem like we’re making new laws, but those laws are actually just the same old laws being utilized in a new instance and are, again, more about protecting society from an infected individual than they are about protecting the infected individual. That’s partly how the Charter evolved - the old laws taking into consideration the new fancy ideas from the French Revolution that gained traction around the rights of the individual. How do we go about balancing those two main conflicting goals in a way that respects the individual so that society doesn’t become too authoritative? But also done in a way to ensure that society is still protected from the individual? Conversations around that happen every time we have to apply old laws to new situations. That’s supposed to happen. That doesn’t mean anything is wrong; it’s an important part of the checks and balances within the process to ensure that the rights of the individual are respected while the rights of everyone else are also respected. This is normal. 

Understanding this fundamental part of how the formation of Canada differs from America - where that balance is shifted so that rights of the individual are more heavily weighed over the rights of society - helps to explain a lot of the friction we are currently experiencing in our country. We have a lot of American content, be it TV, social media, in the press, etc., and the way their society is structured is fundamentally different from ours in this way. 

You can see it in the recent bail hearing for one of the Ottawa Freedom Convoy organizers, whose husband stated that he believed he was in Ottawa to protect their First Amendment Rights. 1) Wrong country. We don’t have ‘First Amendment Rights’. 2) Freedom of expression here, again, is limited by its effect on society and/or how it may impact other individuals, ie., hate speech and child pornography. We don’t look at it from the perspective of having to ‘protect’ free speech here. We look at it from the perspective of ‘is your speech infringing on other people’s rights/the rights of society?’ They’re actually quite different perspectives. 

The same goes for our public health measures. 

Okay, back to the history. 

We’re going to jump ahead here to the emergence of cholera. Cholera spread all across Europe and North America in the 1830’s. It reached Quebec in 1832 and spread all along the St Laurence River. The first strategies used against it were essentially the same that had been used against the plague, but by this time things were becoming more coordinated and structured. Ships had “licences” that told ports where they were travelling from, which were used to determine whether or not the ship had to quarantine so the spread of infectious disease into North America had been fairly well contained for a while. People were used to ships and goods being quarantined, but generally hadn’t had to deal with sweeping quarantines of individuals within the colonies. But when cholera got here, all of that changed. Sick people were forced into lazarettos, and their contacts were traced and quarantined. Since it had been a while since a major disease had spread this quickly, people were unused to such harsh measures and, basically, it created widespread fear and resentment. Combined with the spreading notion of the rights of the citizen from the French Revolution that had happened in 1789 (news travelled slow back then), outcries of personal liberties being infringed upon began. 

Social and political tensions created an explosive mixture, culminating in popular rebellions and uprisings in Europe and across North America. Conspiracy theories that cholera was really just the ruling class poisoning the poor were rampant. Some places used the cholera epidemic as a justification for increasing police power. “Anticontagionists” (real thing), who disbelieved that cholera was a communicable disease at all, protested quarantine measures, saying that the practices were a relic of the past, useless, and damaging to commerce. They complained that the free movement of travellers was hindered by sanitary cordons and by controls at border crossings. Local authorities were reluctant to abandon the protection of the traditional public health strategies because, despite this small vocal group’s opinions, they still provided an antidote to population panic, which, during a serious epidemic, can produce chaos and disrupt public order. Also, they still worked. Any strategy they tried to replace them with failed miserably. 

The public became gripped with widespread fear of the disease and distrust of authority figures - most of all doctors. Unbalanced press reporting led people to think that more victims died in the hospital than at their homes, and the public began to believe that victims taken to hospitals were killed by doctors for anatomical dissection, an outcome they referred to as “Burking.” This fear resulted in several “cholera riots”.

Any of this sounding familiar? 1830’s and the ‘but the economy…’ crowd already in full swing.  

Between 1852 and 1923, the world would see four more cholera pandemics. The third pandemic, stretching 1852–1859, was the deadliest. It devastated Asia, Europe, North America and Africa, killing 23,000 people in Great Britain alone in 1854, the worst single year of cholera.

In that year, British physician John Snow (his real name, not a Game of Thrones reference), who’s considered one of the fathers of modern epidemiology, carefully mapped cholera cases in the Soho area of London, allowing him to identify the source of the disease in the area - contaminated water from a public well. 

You see, back in those days, it was believed that disease arose from ‘foul smells’, so sewage, rotting food, everything was just dumped into whatever water sources were close by to get rid of the ‘bad smells’. This, of course, led to widespread contamination of drinking water. 

John Snow convinced officials to remove access to the public well and immediately the cholera cases in the area dropped. This discovery eventually led to improved sanitation, separation of waste water, and better drinking water supply and sanitation, but it took a long time to convince people that it was the water that was actually the problem. When they did manage to… Again, more widespread misinformation, distrust, panic, and a bunch of riots. People were really committed to the idea that the ruling class was intentionally poisoning the water supply to kill poor people. It got real ugly. 

It wasn’t until 1883, when German microbiologist Robert Koch, the founder of modern bacteriology, studied cholera in Egypt and Calcutta. He developed a technique allowing him to grow and describe Vibrio cholerae, the organism that causes cholera, and then showed the presence of the bacterium in intestines, which can then be spread to others through poop contaminating drinking water supplies. Again - uproar, uprisings, people not believing that poop water was bad for you. People were real committed to drinking the poop water. People didn’t want to have to ‘change how we do things’, governments didn’t want to have to invest the money to make the changes required to make drinking water safe, people downplayed the dangers, more riots, you get the idea.

With that fun story, let’s go back to smallpox and discuss anti-vaccinationists. Would it surprise you to know that there has been an anti-vaccine movement since the first vaccine mandate against smallpox in 1853? 

In Britain in 1853, the first law requiring mandatory vaccination against smallpox passed. Immediately after, the ‘Anti-Vaccination League’ arouse demanding an end to the mandate as it infringed upon their personal liberties and choices. There were, again, violent riots. 

These laws extended to Canadian colonies. Canada wasn’t established until 1867. So our first mandatory vaccination laws actually pre-date the formation of our country. I want you to let that sink in for a second. Think about all the hoopla right now about vaccine mandates and how they somehow violate our Charter Rights and understand that this fight has continued since before our country even formed. Our laws around all of this have grown up right alongside our country and the development of that Charter and those rights and freedoms. So all of the horrible Nazis references and the Nuremberg Code and public experimentation conspiracy theories being spouted now like this is all some big new thing that only JUST happened for the first time ever… It isn’t. They’re just terribly misinformed people, using a horrible event in our past to somehow justify the fear they’re feeling and inflicting that rage upon the other people around them with zero regard for the folks actually connected to that event or how that horribleness may be affecting them. Which, for all you ‘but the Charter’ folks - is ACTUALLY against Section 1 of our Charter. 

Interesting to note, during this era, French Canadians were generally much more suspicious of vaccination than English Canadians, although anti-vaccination sentiment could be found across the country. French Quebecers associated vaccination with British surgeons and while many of them lived in filthy, overcrowded conditions in the poorest neighbourhoods of Montreal, they were hostile to public health attempts to help them or to contain the disease. Homeopathic advocates called the vaccinators charlatans and many among the poor saw it all as a conspiracy of the rich and powerful trying to kill their children.

Again, before our country even formed. None of this is new. I cannot stress that enough. 

Let’s move along to summer of 1906 and Typhoid Mary. 

Mary Mallon was born in Ireland in 1869 and immigrated to the US in 1884. She was employed in 1906 as a cook by Charles Henry Warren, a wealthy New York banker, who rented a residence in Oyster Bay on the north coast of Long Island for the summer. Typhoid is a bacterial illness that can be spread through contaminated drinking water, much like cholera. 

That summer, 6 of the 11 people in residence with Mary came down with typhoid, an illness that can also be fatal about 10% of the time. Mary was one of those infected. She recovered, but remained infected with the bacteria, becoming what is known as a “healthy carrier” - you feel fine, but you contaminate everything around you. By March 1907, Mary Mallon worked in Manhattan as a cook and served 8 families. That year, about 3,000 New Yorkers had been infected by Typhoid, and contact tracing revealed that Mary was the centre for the outbreak. Of the 8 families she worked for, seven of them had experienced cases of typhoid. Twenty-two people presented signs of infection and some died. Those 22 people spread the disease to 3000. 

Since immunization against Typhoid was not developed until 1911, and antibiotic treatment was not available until 1948, a healthy carrier of typhoid was dangerous to the general public, so Mary was arrested and forced into quarantine on North Brother Island where she stayed for 2 years. In 1910, a new health commissioner vowed to free Mary and assist her with finding suitable employment as a ‘domestic’ but not as a cook. Mary was released but never intended to abide by the agreement. She started working again immediately as a cook under the name “Mary Brown” at Sloane Maternity in Manhattan. In 3 months she infected at least 25 people, doctors, nurses and staff. Two of them died. 

Since then she was stigmatized as “Typhoid Mary” and became synonymous with the spread of disease, as many were infected due to her denial of being ill. She was the butt of jokes, cartoons, and eventually “Typhoid Mary” appeared in medical dictionaries as a disease carrier. Mary was placed back on North Brother Island where she remained until her death, 24 years later. She died alone. 

Etc., etc., etc. 

How we doing? Getting the idea? Do you need more examples? I have plenty. New disease happens, public health mandates come in to prevent the spread and protect the public from the infectious individuals. People are ostracized. People refuse to believe the disease is real. People flip out and demand their freedoms. People knowingly spread the disease in the name of those freedoms and denial of its existence. Vaccinations come along to stop the disease. People flip out and refuse to take them. Conspiracy theories abound. The press spread misinformation. Riots. Violence. Vaccination mandates. More flipping out. Then everything calms down, goes back to normal for awhile, new disease emerges and the cycle repeats. For centuries. 

Know what’s going to happen with covid? The same thing as every other disease. We will eventually get on with it. Life will settle in to whatever the new normal is. People will get used to all the new air filtration advancements and laugh at how silly people were and how gross society was ‘back then’. And then it will all just happen again with whatever the new disease is. 

Know what will remain exactly the same though? The public health measures that will be employed when that new disease emerges. They haven’t changed in centuries. Because they work. Your rights remain intact. You didn’t lose any freedoms. You never had whatever it is you think you lost in the first place. Because these public health measures actually pre-date our actual country. And without them, the germs win. Every time. So they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. They respect our Charter of Rights, the rights of the patient, all of it. Because they have grown up alongside the evolution of our individual rights and freedoms. Again, you haven’t lost anything. 

To put a real fine point on it using the cholera example - you have the right to drink poop water yourself. Fill yer boots. (However, generally we now recognize the desire to drink poop water as the mental illness it is and you will likely be stopped for your own good.) You do not, however, have the right to dump your poop into other people’s drinking water. I think we can all agree that that’s fair. 

So, if we’re thinking about covid as the cholera of the air - you have the right to get infected with covid and breathe your own covid air. You do not have the right to then dump your air into the air that other people breathe. You can get all Big Mad about that, but recognize that you’re just the folks in history who got Big Mad about not getting to drink the poop water anymore. You’re the folks who got Big Mad at the vaccines that eradicated smallpox and started anti-vaccine societies, harassed doctors, and claimed that everyone was just trying to kill your children. See how ridiculous that sounds from the vantage point of time’s passage? Do you really want to be remembered as being part of the ‘pro-freedom to breathe the covid air (aka drink the poop water)’ brigade? Cause I promise you, history is going to remember all those folks exactly that way. It will be taught in our schools as just another example in a long line of examples. I learned all of this twenty years ago. This is why public health officials remain unfazed by all the hoopla happening now. None of it is new. You’re not unique ‘freedom fighters’ who just ‘woke up’ to the ‘tyranny’ of public health measures, valiantly defending peoples’ ‘freedoms’. You’re just the folks from a point in time in history that decided to make life hard for everyone because you didn’t know what else to do during a pandemic. Like all the other people who did the exact same thing throughout history when confronted with the same. 

As the saying goes, those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. 

So, all of that said, make good choices. After all, isn’t life difficult enough?

Till next time, Folks! Be kind to one another! 

For more reading on this, or to check out the sources I used to write this, here’s a list:

Conti AA. Quarantine Through History. International Encyclopedia of Public Health. 2008;454-462. doi:10.1016/B978-012373960-5.00380-4

Drews, K. (2013). A Brief History of Quarantine. The Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review, 2. DOI: http://doi.org/10.21061/vtuhr.v2i0.16

Hillel Shuval, Badri Fattal, 15 - Control of pathogenic microorganisms in wastewater recycling and reuse in agriculture, Editor(s): Duncan Mara, Nigel Horan, Handbook of Water and Wastewater Microbiology, Academic Press, 2003, Pages 241-262, ISBN 9780124701007, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012470100-7/50016-9.

Institute of Medicine (US) Committee for the Study of the Future of Public Health. The Future of Public Health. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1988. 3, A History of the Public Health System. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218224

Tognotti E. Lessons from the history of quarantine, from plague to influenza A. Emerg Infect Dis. 2013;19(2):254-259. doi:10.3201/eid1902.120312

Tulchinsky TH, Varavikova EA. A History of Public Health. The New Public Health. 2014;1-42. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-415766-8.00001-X

This is Public Health, A Canadian History, interactive resource: cpha100.ca

Hate and Wellness

I have been warning about the disturbing rise of white supremacy groups acting within the wellness space for a few years now. Having worked in this field for a decade, it’s been an anomaly that we’ve been seeing much more frequently and there are worldwide discussions around how best to address it.

My first major kerfuffle came during the Unified project - a pilot project for school that involved developing a model for and regulations around bringing complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) disciplines into the Canadian healthcare system so that it would no longer be fee-for-service and instead covered by our healthcare system.

The thing with the CAM professions is that you, generally, have to pay out of pocket for these services, or have a job that has some kind of health insurance that covers them. The vast majority of people who would benefit most from these services can’t afford them - people with chronic pain, disabilities, and marginalized groups.

The model proposed that if we set aside an amount of money from each service that people are already paying for - similar to extra taxes on cigarettes and alcohol - and pool that money, we could establish a self-paying way of integrating these services into the medical model for those who can’t afford them.

It worked really well, for the record. Though you wouldn’t know it from the media coverage.

The thing that I found fascinating at the time was that my work attracted the attention and harassment of a number of known white supremacy groups in the states who were none too happy about the regulations part of the study.

Why would white supremacy groups in the states care about better wellness regulations in Canada, or that these services would become incorporated into the mainstream healthcare system?

Turns out, the wellness-to-white-supremacy pipeline is a thing.

https://www.fridaythings.com/recent-posts/angela-liddon-oh-she-glows-canada-trucker-convoy-2022

Think about it, the wellness space is filled primarily with wealthy white women who can afford to spend the time and money on a bunch of woo who like to reject mainstream healthcare and are easily misled by junk science and misinformation.

I was taking away their ability to influence and recruit an entire fundraising group.

I wasn’t super vocal about it at the time because I was also involved in the court case against that serial sexual predator massage therapist who had a very fervent following hell bent on discrediting me and ranting about white supremacy groups infiltrating the wellness world seemed like I would just be giving them easy fodder for their campaign against me. Plus, historically, they aren’t the most stable bunch and who needs that in their lives? But it seems a good time to point it out now.

This isn’t new. I’ve been speaking out more lately about the seedy underbelly of the wellness world and the infiltration of white supremacy groups within this sphere is important to acknowledge. We can’t fix a problem if we don’t acknowledge that it exists. So let’s start some conversations about what we need to do about this to safeguard vulnerable people from hate groups in Canada. It’s important. And it’s time that we start to pay attention to it.