Dr. Anthony was listening to Huberman Lab and heard a mention of research on the neurophysiology of choking under pressure. Not the gag reflex kind, the high stakes performance kind. He couldn't stop thinking about how directly it maps onto every patient sitting in your office stuck in chronic sympathetic stress.

The stress response runs on two systems, not one. There's the salience network, the fast one, amygdala and midbrain, threat detection in milliseconds, no thinking involved. And there's the executive control network, the slow one, prefrontal cortex, the part that can actually evaluate a threat instead of just reacting to it. A nervous system stuck in chronic stress isn't broken. It's an alarm system running with nothing pushing back on it.

What's covered:

Why stress from an unrelated event yesterday primes the threat system to overreact to something small today
The pregenual ACC and why early life stress exposure, per the ACE studies, predicts how well built someone's regulating circuitry actually is, their brake pedal
Why subluxation and dysafferentation load the nervous system so heavily that some patients wake up already past their fight or flight threshold
The beta blocker study that isolated norepinephrine from cortisol and proved the fast system doesn't answer to logic, "musician steroids" and all
Why it's not chiropractic's job to remove the stressor, it's to lower the noise reaching the brain so the nervous system has room to adapt
What outcome measures actually look like for this: EMG, thermal scans, heart rate variability, whatever shows the noise going down visit over visit

This is why "just relax" was never going to work on command, and what to say to a patient instead. Send it to a doc who needs a real answer for the patient who says "I know I'm fine, I just can't calm down."

00:00 Two Stress Clocks

00:18 Podcast Welcome

00:49 Choking Under Pressure

01:51 Two Stress Networks

03:59 Chronic Stress Load

05:11 Brake Pedal Development

05:56 Subluxation And Threshold

07:39 Measuring Nervous System Change

08:20 Norepinephrine Vs Cortisol

09:20 Why Relax Fails

10:26 Key Takeaways

11:22 Closing And Subscribe

42 - Logic Doesn't Answer to a Fast Nervous System

The Cranial Doc | A Chiropractic & Cranial Mastery Show for Pediatric, Family, and Neurologically-based Chiropractors

42 - Logic Doesn't Answer to a Fast Nervous System