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:
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Why stress from an unrelated event yesterday primes the threat system to overreact to something small today
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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
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Why subluxation and dysafferentation load the nervous system so heavily that some patients wake up already past their fight or flight threshold
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The beta blocker study that isolated norepinephrine from cortisol and proved the fast system doesn’t answer to logic, “musician steroids” and all
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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
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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