Why You Can’t Heal Until Your Body Feels Safe… and How To Get There with Dr. David Rabin
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You don't feel stressed. You're managing life just fine, right? So why does your body still feel anxious, tense, or completely wiped out? The truth is there's a hidden stress response running in the background, and it could be sabotaging more than you realize. This is Smart People Podcast. Podcast for smart people, where we talk to smart people, but not necessarily done by smart people.

Today, we're building on last week's conversation with Dr. Sharon Bergquist by going even deeper into the hidden side of stress, the kind you don't see coming.

Our guest is Dr. David Rabin, a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and co-founder of Apollo Neuro. He's one of the few experts bridging psychedelic science, wearable tech, and trauma-informed therapy to explore how our nervous system holds on to stress even when we think we've moved on. In this episode, we unpack why your body might still be operating in survival mode, how chronic stress literally reroutes blood flow away from healing systems, and how

and what it really takes to shift from coping to recovery. You'll learn about how trauma can be passed down and why experiential healing is the powerful solution.

Whether you're burned out, stuck in anxiety, or just curious about the neuroscience of healing, this episode is for you. Also highly recommend downloading the Apollo Neuro app. It's free to try. I've been using it daily. And trust me, it's a game changer. Let's get into it. Our conversation with Dr. Dave Rabin about the psychology and neuroscience of safety and how we can simply feel better in our bodies. Enjoy. Enjoy.

What is needed for the body to heal itself when we're dealing with something so ambiguous as stress? That's a great question. I mean, my blunt answer to that is we just need to get out of the damn way.

But our bodies, if you look at, and I think the neuroscience really points to this, especially in modern day. But even if you look back to Hippocrates and Maimonides, who are the founders, considered like the forefathers of Western medicine, and then go back even further to, you know, the founders of an ancient principles of Eastern and tribal medicine, they all agree on this.

A few things. And one of those major points that all of these ancient medicine disciplines, including modern Western medicine agrees on is that the source of healing, any healing has to come from the person who's seeking to be healed.

And that's really powerful, right? And so if you think about what that means, that means that all disciplines of medicine and healing have always agreed that the source of healing is us, right? And so it's not the medicine. It's not the doctor. It's not the therapist. It's not the surgery. It's not the antibiotics. Those are all tools that help augment

augment the body's ability to heal itself, but the healing actually comes from the body and it's self-generated. And a lot of that has to do with knowing that we have the ability to heal ourselves, which allows us to then kick on and divert resources back to the healing parts of the body that are responsible for that process. And modern neuroscience is

is really catching up to this, but it's pretty unequivocal that, um, the parts of the body that are evolved to self heal are what's called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the counterpart to the stress response, fight or flight nervous system. And it's governed by the vagus nerve, which we were, you know, been talking about and you've talked about a lot. Um,

with Stephen Porges and others. And this nerve is one of the most important nerves of the body. That's very poorly taught in modern medicine, but it's extremely important. And when you activate that nerve in the body and

and send resources to that nerve, which it's activated by safety, vagal maneuvers, soothing techniques, deep breathing, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, like all hugs, all of these like natural things. When you activate that nerve, all of a sudden the body is like, oh, I'm safe enough to send resources to the parts of my body that are important for recovery. I'm not running from a lion right now, so I'm safe enough to heal.

And that's the getting out of the way part. So when we're, when our bodies recognize that we're safe, all of a sudden they can reallocate resources like blood, which carries oxygen to organs and nutrients and waste away from organ systems to be able to start the healing process or resume the healing process. And that's kind of how we're thinking about it in 21st century psychiatry. It does seem a little counter to what we are programmed to think from an early age, which is health.

is often externally driven. I'll give you an example. I have had a back pain for a long time. Uh, I had back pain so bad that I couldn't stand, sit, sleep, move, walk. I mean, I was basically, it was horrible. Anyway, it was the worst, the worst. And I got a little micro discectomy right in and out surgery took and like instantly felt better.

How does that align with this idea of the body healed, but like a guy went in and dug out part of my disc? Yeah. So, yeah. So, so that's an example that we can, we can kind of,

works with any surgical procedure is that there's something going on in the body due to chronic stress of some sort. In the case of back pain, the most common reasons for back pain are chronic orthopedic stress. So it could be like lifting stuff too heavy for too long. It could be, you know, walking or sitting in a body position that is crunching or disruptive to the spinal column for too long, um, or any number of other things, physical trauma, et cetera.

But the point being that there is some insult that changed your body's physiology in terms of like,

a disc may be pressing on part of your spinal cord or nerve that results in chronic pain. And the pain is the signal that something is awry. And then, you know, you probably tried to do a whole bunch of things naturally to solve that. And it probably, you know, might like the injury or whatever it was that was causing the problem might've been too severe for natural techniques to, to solve the problem completely. Um,

And so then you invite in, okay, like where's the next level tool that I can go to? And one of those tools is surgery. And so the surgeon comes in and the surgeon opens you up and removes the offending agent that's pressing on your nerve or, you know, works their magic. And then all of a sudden your body has the offending agent, the nerve pressure that was caused by the injury or whatever it might've been, the chronic injury, the stress removed.

So the source of that repeated pain gets removed from your body. That being said, if you didn't do the aftercare after that surgery, if you didn't take care of the wound properly, if you didn't do the physical therapy and et cetera to get yourself back to your normal level of care and you just repeated the same things that got you to the back pain place, then you would find yourself unhealed.

And the reason why your surgery works is because you're making life changes that are fairly distinct life changes and sometimes significant life changes that result in allowing your body to heal faster.

After the surgery, surgical procedure has completed. So the surgery, the surgery is a is a technique tool. It's a facilitator of healing. It's putting the body into a state where because when we're in pain, pain's a massive stress response. It makes our bodies have a very hard time with healing.

And so you're removing the additional insult to that's causing the chronic pain. All of a sudden your body relaxes and it's like, oh, if I just make these changes, I can be back pain free forever. And that is motivating enough for most people to do it. And they do it. And all of a sudden life gets a lot better, but ultimately it's your body that is healing itself.

With the assistance of the surgery or the tool. Does that make sense? It does. And you know what? It strangely aligns with, I bought this book recently called healing back pain and in it,

I'm paraphrasing, but the idea is essentially like we are constantly dealing with various tensions. And if we hold them subconsciously or unconsciously or in the wrong place, then it can have insults on the body, which lead to pain over time, which if we can deal with the

psychological tension first, then we can ease the physical tension, which allows the body to heal. And I'll tell you where he sold me because at first it sounded like a bunch of gobbledygook. He basically talked about evolution. Like if we are going to live for

40 to 100 years, whatever it is, it doesn't make sense that there's just things in the body that are like, yeah, but this one, once it's broken, it's broken forever. And by the way, it breaks pretty easily. Like you just tied your shoe the wrong way. It just, it started to...

Makes sense that we have internalized a medical system that portrays us as weak and fallible and in need of others. Yeah, that is the externalizing of the healer is what we call it, which is the idea of

of I need stuff, people, et cetera, from outside to heal me because I can't do it on my own. My body is fragile or it's weak. It can be easily compromised. And so then I need things from outside to heal. And this is actually an artifact of the businessification of medicine or the commodification of medicine. It's not...

the way medicine was historically taught. Even going back probably to pre-1970s, this is not how medicine was taught. Medicine was very much taught as to every patient is about internalizing the healer. It's recognizing your internal, inborn, innate ability to heal yourself, and we're just helping you get there.

But for many, several decades now, it's been taught the other way because there is now a perverse business incentive in healthcare where it's become more like sick care rather than healthcare, right? So it's like, we're not focusing on keeping you healthy to prevent you from getting ill. We're just waiting for you to get sick. And then when you get sick, then we take care of you. But once you're sick and the body has learned to be in a sick state, sometimes it can take a really long time to get the body back into a healthy state.

And so that

Unfortunately, despite many of us doctors trying desperately to inform the public and the administration, political administration, that commodifying healthcare is very, very dangerous to the practice and delivery of healthcare down to every individual patient's psychology and way they think about their ability to heal, which it does penetrate that deeply, that if people believe that

Right.

Right. And so, so that it decommodities, like when we focus on the natural techniques first in our, what many ancient traditions kind of refer to in some ways is like your inner healing intelligence or, or healing intelligence, intuitive healing intelligence, lots of different ways to describe it. Um,

all of a sudden, if we become independent healers of ourselves, then we're not reliant on purchasing drugs or surgeries or doctor's visits to get better. But also there's not enough doctors to do that work. So we need people to preserve our country, our society, like

healthcare in its current business model is bankrupting America and it's not good. So we really need to shift. And I think that's a lot of the motivation shift back into helping everybody wake up to recognize their own healing ability. But this has been a problem since probably Richard Nixon did his first deal with Kaiser in the 1970s before HMOs existed. And now that created this kind of like

healthcare commodity mentality. And it changed the way we look at healing. So we're getting back to helping everybody remember that they can heal themselves for the sake of ourselves and our own health and for the sake of preserving and not bankrupting our society, but it's a journey.

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What I'd like to understand a little deeper. I think most people get this idea of when we're in fight or flight, the body prioritizes survival, shuts down the healing process or digestion or all that. But your focus is so much deeper than that. And because in my mind, what I've learned is the vagus nerve, it's like a cable. It's just transmitting information. And maybe that's wrong, but if that's true, then

How can it play such an important role in something as critical as the entirety of the body's healing process and our health and wellness? Yeah, I mean, to your point, all nerves are kind of like cables and they're cables that dynamically grow and shrink over time, depending on how much information is sent through them. So to that end, it certainly is like a cable, but it's a cable that changes over time. And so is every other nerve in your body.

The interesting thing about the vagus nerve in particular is what it, and all nerves is not the fact that they transmit information, it's what information do they transmit and to where, from where to where, right? So the vagus nerve is particularly interesting because it transmits information from the brainstem

to all parts of the body. Every single part of the body is basically innervated by the vagus nerve. And one of the major things that it does is it tells the body to slow down. So when we're under stress and stress being like, it could be anything that tricks our bodies into thinking we're in a fight or flight survival state, um,

the vagus nerve gets turned down or off, mostly off because it's sending, the vagus nerve is sending resources to and activating digestion, immunity, recovery, sleep, reproduction, empathy, creativity. Most of those things, if not all of them, we do not and have evolved to not want to be active when we're like running from a lion or running out of food or water, right? Like if we were thinking about reproducing,

when we're being chased by a lion and sending resources to that instead of our skeletal muscles, we could probably and most likely would die. So the body would be eaten. So the body has these, and this goes back to ancient animals, like ancient reptiles that are probably like, you know, 300 million years older than us, that they have the same fundamental nervous system around fear and safety responses and how that relates to resource allocation in the body. And I think what's very poorly taught is

Is that there's only so many resources to go around. So, right, we only we have all this blood in our bodies and everybody's like, oh, well, there's so much blood. It's it can feed everything at once. But that's not actually the case. The body regulates which organ systems and which parts of the brain and body get or get access to that blood flow as much blood as they need. Right.

by changing activity in the autonomic nervous system, which is that sympathetic fight or flight nervous system and the parasympathetic rest and recovery vagus nerve system. And so the vagus, so when we're under threat, to put it simply, when we're under threat, when we're running from a lion, or when we are tricked into thinking we're under threat from too many emails, too many pings, too many responsibilities, too much news, too much traffic, et cetera, et cetera, our bodies get tricked into being in a threatened situation.

survival state. And then our, our amygdala, the fear center in the center of the brain, which is called the reptilian brain, because it goes all the way back to ancient reptiles, sends a signal that says we're under threat. So we need to take all blood available. And what it does is, and send it to heart, lungs, skeletal muscles, motor cortex, fear center of the brain to get us out of fight or flight or freeze, get us out of that situation.

To safety. And there's only so much blood to go around. So where does it get that blood? Well, it gets it from reproduction, digestion, immunity, the rest and sleep systems, the creativity and empathy systems, all of the systems that are not deemed necessary evolutionarily to escape from a threat. They get the blood vessels going to them clamp down.

And so less blood goes there and that blood gets re diverted to the skeletal muscles, heart, lungs, motor cortex, everything that's required for survival. When we get back to safety, um,

safety trigger is triggering of the vagus nerve. And so when we get back to safety, the vagus nerve gets active activated and it's supposed to be activated by safety and no longer having survival spread around. And that does the opposite. It says, okay, clamp down on the blood flow going to heart, lungs, motor cortex, fear center, skeletal muscles, because we don't need to fight or flight anymore. And then open up the blood vessels to

the reproductive system, the digestive system, the immune system, the sleep system, your empathy and connective connecting systems, interrelational systems, all of the systems that are important for thriving when you're already have gotten to safety and survival. And that's how the autonomic nervous system as it's called, regulates everything in the background for us. And we what's not taught well is that we can control it. So by

doing different breathing techniques, meditation techniques, yoga, soothing touch, soothing music, tools like Apollo, things that remind us that we're safe, chanting OM, right? Like holding pets, going to the ocean, all of those experiences remind us that we're safe and then boost vagus nerve activity and then redirect blood flow back to recovery systems, which is why those are healing experiences. Okay. And so one of the interesting things, when you say boost vagus nerve activity,

So the vagus nerves only job is rest and recovery? Pulling things down and rest and recovery, pretty much, yeah. Yeah, okay. I don't think I realized that. So if the vagus nerve is shut down, what is sending things through the body? The sympathetic nervous system. Is there a cable associated with that? Yeah, many.

Oh, okay. Yeah. You just don't hear about them. I don't know about those. Yeah. Well, well, so yeah, so it's a different nervous, it's a different nerve pathway that also comes from the brain that goes through what's called the stellate ganglion in the back of the neck.

And the spinal column and the stellate ganglion have sympathetic nerve fibers that branch out to every part of the body and also determine blood flow. And so the vagus nerve, the key nerve of the parasympathetic system and the sympathetic nerve fibers are working in balance with each other all the time. All right.

Okay. I don't think I realized that. Yeah. Yeah. And their real focus is resource allocation. Right. Didn't realize that. That's fascinating. That part, that's crazy. It really simplifies it, right? Like when you think about like chronic stress as a resource allocation problem, then disease does not seem...

as complicated of how we got here, right? Because we get sick because we are asking our organ systems like our sleep system, our reproductive system, our digestive system to still function at peak, but we're under chronic stress, right? So are they getting enough blood and resources to function at peak? Absolutely not. That means they produce more waste. Blood takes away waste and delivers nutrients. So now you have

too little nutrients coming into these organ systems, too little waste being taken away. When you don't have enough nutrients, then the systems start to use other things as nutrients, which create more toxic reactive oxygen species byproducts that actually cause more damage to the organs. And then over time, under chronic daily stress, which is not natural to humans or any other animal, our organ systems start to dysfunction. And that's why when you look at people

people who have the most common issues in health, which are like, and in reproductive health, like infertility, sexual dysfunction, digestive issues like IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, or GI upset of any kind, and insomnia and mood and depression, anxiety issues. In large part, those organ systems are dysfunctioning because they're resource deprived for an extended period of time.

So if you start to, if you think like, how long would you last without nutrients and garbage pickup? Right, right. Yeah.

Yeah, not very long, like maybe a week before you start to go crazy and lose it, right? And make serious life changes. I mean, but our organ systems can't do that. They're just asking for help, but we're just not tuned in to listen to them because we were never taught. And so managing the chronic, the stress system and the impact of stress in our bodies and balancing stress and performance with recovery, which is what I work on with elite performers, elite athletes, you know, military veterans and that kind of thing and entrepreneurs is,

fundamental to not burning out and maintaining a long, healthy life where you're maintaining and sustaining peak performance and even excelling at your human potential, like pushing your human potential limits to beyond what you ever thought possible because you're constantly refilling your tank. If you don't refill the tank, why would you expect your car to run? Right. Right. It seems like

Much of what we've talked about and you've mentioned is going towards the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic system. But does this all originate in the brain though? Because I imagine it is the switch, right? It's the one saying sympathetic or parasympathetic. So should we be focusing on the signals it's sending out before we focus on the delivery mechanism, which is the nerves?

Yeah, I mean, it's both. So I think the, and the way we think about this is like top down learning versus bottom up experiential learning. So there's two ways to, two key ways to learn. This is also very poorly taught.

So top down learning is when you like if you were my patient, you came to me and said, hey, doc, I need your advice on how to do blah, blah, blah. And then I tell you what to do. And then I give you instructions and then you go home and try to do it and practice it. That's top down learning. And what's been shown in studies, even with doctors, which people that people trust and pay for their advice is that patients follow our advice accurately at best 50 percent of the time when they learn in that way.

which isn't very good. And so if we were to, and the main reason why is because when we're already stressed out and especially under chronic stress, including having a disease or an illness, which induces chronic stress in the body, pain being one of those things, right?

you're again, you have a resource allocation problem in the body. One of our key resources or key systems in the body gets shut down and gets resource deprived when we are under chronic stress is the learning part of our bodies. So learning anything new becomes very, very hard. And if not nearly impossible to change habits when we're under chronic stress or pain or ill. And so you

No matter, I could tell you what to do until the cows come home and you could tell me that you understand exactly what I'm saying and then go home and try to do it and struggle for many years before it finally settles in because your body is not optimized for a learning state. Does that make sense? 100%. Yeah. So then we, so then that's, that's again, like that's reinforced by this resource allocation understanding of the nervous system.

So then how do we get more blood flow? Like if we're talking about increasing learning ability, increasing ability to change bad habits, increasing ability to make any life changes, learn new things, grow neuroplasticity and learning from a neuroscience perspective, how do we do that? And the way we do that is we teach the body from the bottom up, from the body to the brain, right?

And this is called experiential learning. And it was talked about in the lay press, probably in the most famous book called The Inner Game of Tennis, where the USC tennis, very famous book where the USC tennis coach in the 80s or 90s, I think,

It was figured out that if he showed his tennis players what a great shot looks like, rather than just constantly telling them how to make a great shot, they performed much better and learned it much faster just by experiencing it, watching it, repeating and imitating it rather than being told.

And this really kind of brought this idea front and center into athletics and the Western general world out of science. And what's happening when people do that is they have an understanding of not just what they're supposed to be doing in the instruction manual, but they have an understanding of what it feels like to do it.

And so in the case of meditation, for instance, most people who have not meditated before have no idea what it feels like to actually achieve a meditative state.

They don't even know what it feels like. And so if you don't know what it feels like and you're following the instructions, how do you know when you've gotten there? You don't. And so people get really frustrated by that and they just give up. And so what works a lot better than just handing somebody the instruction manual and saying, hey, follow these directions to get to your end goal is to first give people the experience of what it feels like to feel calm and safe and in a recovery state in their bodies or in a meditative state.

And it can be something as simple as, you know, getting a hug or chanting OM or doing a deep breathing exercise with somebody together or using technology now like Apollo that uses vibrations to induce these states in the body. Or in some cases, we use psychedelic medicine to help people understand the feeling of a quiet mind or the feeling of watching yourself without judgment or the feeling of meditation. And then once you know that feeling, all of a sudden it

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Wow. You know, I absolutely love that explanation, especially if you think about what this podcast is and listening to this podcast and those listening, right? It's heavily thought provoking. It's driven by a lot of this idea that I have, which is most things can be solved and figured out. And it is thought intensive.

But ultimately, I think it allows us to not just do the thing or not just get the result or not just. And again, I go back to it is this belief that we must know before we can do. And what I think you're saying is like, well, what if you could do first and then you get the result and that teaches the no without you having to get all of the information. And I'm just thinking about the nerves as you talked about them. If we can.

the vagus nerve in a healthy way that shows the body what health and wellness and slowness feels like, then that probably changes the structure of that nerve to function properly. And so you didn't have to learn all this stuff to get the benefit to an extent. Yeah, exactly. And to give you a very concrete example of this, um, if

If you think about like public speaking, which is one of the greatest fears that most humans have, like people report in surveys that they fear public speaking more than death. So just an idea, right? That's that idea of having to go up and give a speech or present something or be interviewed is inducing of a stress response. And so it induces a fear response in the body. And so if you don't remember that,

Being like being, giving, doing a public speaking engagement and not being afraid, then every time you think about public speaking, the first thing you think about is fear. Right. And lack of safety associated with public speaking. It creates literally a hard, like a synaptic connection between the two parts of the brain, one fear center, the other, the act of public speaking. And so what we're doing is.

When we are addressing that is we're retraining that neural network to rather than associate the idea of public speaking or the act of public speaking with fear, we're reassociating it with safety. And then you build a network around that and you induce neural remodeling or neural network remodeling in the process of just reassociating.

reminding yourself that you're safe when you're about to go on stage or thinking about public speaking. And this is called exposure therapy. And it's used very commonly to treat PTSD, but it's something that we do as humans every day. And we have the capacity to do every day. And it could be somebody, you know, just, it could be just like taking some deep breaths or, you know, listening to music you really like before you go on stage or what

Whatever it is, just calming your body down before you're about to do something that used to make you afraid. And the first thing that happens psychologically in those states, and we see this with Apollo all the time because of the way that it works to help the body feel safe through the vagus nerve, through touch, is that people almost immediately turn to us and they say,

I don't remember the last time I felt safe doing X or, and especially in veterans with PTSD, because those folks don't feel safe at all. When they come home, they're like in a, like 24 seven and trained fear state. And the first thing that we hear is I don't remember the last time I felt safe doing this thing that I'm doing. And when you have that recognition, it really clicks this neural, this neural network in the brain that says, wait,

I can feel safe doing this thing that I always felt afraid to do. That means it's possible, right? And if it's possible, then that means that you can do things in your life to retrain that safety association, that safety network. And then you don't have to be afraid to publicly speak or to go to work or to be around a spider or whatever it is, or to take a flight, right? Like the point is you can retrain those networks. Medications alone don't do that.

Medications alone just numb the fear response, but then the fear response comes back full force after. And so that's why we always recommend, like if you're going to take medication for that kind of issue, you should be doing therapy with it so that you can overcome

to overcome and retrain the fear response. But if you don't do the therapy with it, then you're going to continue to have that entrained fear response in your body, and it's not going to go away. And that's really the difference between the way we used to practice psychiatry, which we're still in and kind of coming out of, which is just take this medicine to numb you to your feelings and all will be well, to actually we're going to retrain your brain.

to function the way you want it to function to achieve your goals. And that's what we're really moving psychiatry in this generation. So help me then with this, because I think there's a lot of people listening that probably say, I know I'm stressed, but...

I don't, I don't know why, or I don't know how to get out of it. Like, this is just the life I've known. It's the person I am. I'm a, I'm a overthinking overachiever. A lot of people listening to the show. Um, it's in my constitution and it has negative impacts. Where do we go? Because I, even myself, like, yeah, you can do therapy, but at least personally, the

Hey, tell me about how your childhood was screwed up. And I'm like, it wasn't, I don't know where to go because you know that phrase, you don't know what you don't know. Yeah. How do we solve that? Or at least begin to. Yeah. So that's a great question. And I think the,

The short answer, you know, is really drawn from ancient Eastern tribal techniques around what's called somatic therapy, which is body first bottom up therapy. But this is reinforced by Bessel van der Kolk's book, very famous psychiatry short the book, the body keeps the score. Oh, yeah.

which is a really nice piece on how the body stores information that we are not necessarily aware of. Do you think that's true? I love this. It is true. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. And I mean, to a large extent, it's been scientifically proven. And to give you an idea, like...

of how it's been proven not to go into a total segue, but Rachel Yehuda, who's a very famous trauma scientist from Yale and Sinai, did some of the first work in the 80s and 80s, 70s, 80s, 90s, to show that people whose parents have had PTSD, we've known for a very long time, and if your parents had trauma,

And they have children and then their children have children that all of their offspring and generations to go forward have an increased risk of developing mental illnesses like PTSD. Okay. Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Even if they've had safe upbringings in the large part, they haven't experienced same trauma as the ancestors, but they have an increased risk of mental illness and we have never known why.

It's that idea of generational trauma to an extent you're saying is real. And what you're providing is an alternate answer or solution to how mental illness might be hereditary. A lot of times we just blame those on genetics, but it's not.

I mean, it is genetic based, but it's... It's not genetic because genetic means in the DNA. There you go. So our DNA, and I give a brief primer. So our DNA is the same in every single cell in our bodies. The same base code is the same in every cell, except our sperm and egg cells. Every other cell has identical base code. But...

Our cells clearly know how to act to be skin cells versus eye cells versus brain cells versus gut cells, right? They have different expression of that code. And if they all have the same base code, well, how do they know to be all these different millions of different cell types to make a body? And the reason why is because of what's called epigenetics, which means on the DNA.

So every cell in the nucleus of the cell where the DNA lives has DNA and then it has on top of the DNA a layer of markings called epigenetic markings or epigenetic code, which sits on the DNA that says, hey, if your skin turns

Turn up skin proteins, turn down brain and gut and eye. And if you're in the brain, it says it recognizes you as to be brain. It says turn down skin, turn down gut, turn down, you know, et cetera. That's not brain. Turn up brain proteins. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And also the epigenetic component, how it expresses itself.

And wow, that's how the, you're saying essentially that's how the trauma we're talking about can be passed down. It's the, it's the expression of who you are. It is not who you are. It's not genetics. It's the epigenetics. Exactly. And, and the reason why that's a critically important distinction to make is because epigenetics can be modified by the environment, right? So that means that when you inherit a certain epigenetic code from your parents, you're

There's certain parts of that code that are going to be the same, like the parts that know to be skin and the parts that know to be brain and eye, thank God, they're going to be the same. But there are other parts that get passed down that can be modified, which are like the epigenetic changes to stress response genes, like cortisol receptors, which Rachel discovered, that happen when one ancestor has a severe traumatic experience, their cortisol receptor epigenetic changes change.

occur that result in an altered cortisol receptor. And it's those changes that get passed down. And that's what seems to confer an increased rate risk of mental illness in the offspring, even though they didn't have the same kind of traumatic background or maybe any traumatic background that the ancestors had, they can still pass it down.

And so this has, and it's a predisposition. It's not a guarantee. It doesn't mean like you're going to get PTSD or depression or anxiety. It means if you are exposed to severe chronic stress, you have an increased likelihood of that looking like PTSD, depression, anxiety, et cetera. Right. So it's not a guarantee, which is also a really important distinction.

And what's really interesting that we discovered that had never been known before, which is a piece of work that we published in 2022, looking at MDMA-assisted therapy, because MDMA-assisted therapy is the only treatment we have ever had that appears to reverse PTSD. In just three doses of medicine and 12 weeks of psychotherapy, people who had 17.6 years of completely treatment-resistant PTSD tried everything, nothing worked, but

Over 55% of those people are better and no longer meeting diagnostic criteria after the treatment's over. One year out, that number increases to 67%, which means people continue to get better after the treatment is stopped. And we've never seen that with any treatment in the history of mental health.

So when we saw that data come out, I went to Rick Doblin, who is the founder of MAPS, and I said, Rick, these results you're getting are absolutely stunning. We need to figure out how this medicine is working. And then I went to Rachel and others and I said, hey, look, you already showed that there are certain genes like cortisol receptors that are getting FFH.

modified by traumatic experience. Clinically, MDMA seems to fix that in 12 weeks. So what if we just collect some samples from people before they take MDMA who have severe PTSD, collect the same samples afterwards, and then compare what happens to the cortisol receptor code before and after. And it turns out because MDMA has these tremendous results, you should at

you know, there's a saying as above, so below, if your clinical symptoms get better, you should see that change in the body. And lo and behold, we saw epigenetic, what we call epigenetic memory or the storage of stress in the body going back full circle to the body keeps the score that these, uh, that, that these cortisol receptor epigenetics actually start to repair and look more like healthy cortisol receptors, uh, after the MDMA treatment, which, uh,

is highly suggestive that trauma is reversible slash repairable. And we've never on a cellular level, like a DNA level, and we've never known that before. So that's extremely hopeful for our field that we can heal and repair trauma. I know we're coming up on time and I want to talk to you about Apollo because it's incredible. So I have to ask this and then just to see if I'm right, and then we'll move on. And I'm going to have to find out where else I can learn from you because this stuff is mind blowing.

We get a genetic code in terms of DNA from our parents. Now that is going to determine what the, what's in the soup, let's say, but there is a epigenetic code and it is showing what you are predisposed to when presented with a certain scenario. Let's say again, I know there's no body response to stress. There you go. Okay.

What we are now learning is through psychedelics, we can rewrite to an extent that epigenetic code. We can change the way our body reacts to external stimuli. How could it do that?

Well, it's probably doing that all the time, right? Like when you think about the way that there's our nature and nurture, right? So there's what we're born with, which does not change, which is our DNA code. And then there's the environment and everything, all our experiences we have during our lives. And then there has to be some place where what happens to us gets recorded. Right. And...

Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000, a very famous psychiatrist, also Holocaust survivor, and who had extreme trauma in his childhood, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering learning and memory, and also was one of the core people credited with understanding that memory happens on an epigenetic level. Because the modifications to our DNA expression result in new proteins being made, and neurons can't grow without new proteins being made. Proteins are like the fundamental building blocks of the cell. So...

So basically there's a hierarchy of information storage that is not just, oh, neuron A, I just learned something new. So neuron A just connected to neuron B. That's not just what's happening. That's like what it looks like in the neuron level. But if you go into the neurons, those neurons are making new proteins and they make new proteins because of the epigenetic changes that are occurring as a result of the experiences you've had.

And so the question, and so I think what Eric Kandel is really, you know, incredibly game changing, brilliant Nobel prize winning worthy discovery was that he showed that memory is stored and formed in this way and that it actually is very much regulated by what is written and

on the DNA in that epigenetic code, then dictates the proteins that are being made to tell a neuron to grow straight, right, left, up, down, right, wherever, right? It says neuron grow like this. And then the neuron's cellular behavior changes as a result of the environment's impact on the epigenetic code that codes for the building blocks of the cell. So if you think about how that works, that's happening every moment of our lives,

Right. That's not just something that psychedelic medicine is able only psychedelic medicine is able to do. But the reason why we studied it with psychedelic medicine is because when you're our Western science is limited by what our tests are able to detect. And so when you think about that, subtle changes like those that come from.

Five minutes of deep breathing may not be detectable in the body, but you can detect them over the course of months or when amplified by MDMA or some other medicine that accelerates the process and the change, the change process.

or the growth process. So we just knew that MDMA has these radical effects that are unseen with any other healing experience in Western medicine. So that created, the theory was that's going to create enough change that it will be measurable in a significant way on the epigenetic code. And it turns out that it was. But this is just...

further support that these epigenetic, the epigenetic code that is the interface of memory between the environment and us is in fact likely changing all the time in every moment and encoding information in every moment and storing and learning that information. And what will blow your mind even more is that indigenous people have talked about this for thousands of years. You know, they didn't call it epigenetics and they didn't call it DNA. They called it the two intertwining double helical snakes.

which is the symbol of DNA that we didn't discover until Francis Crick and Watson and Rosalind Franklin discovered it in the 1950s. We did not know the DNA was double helix, but somehow the indigenous people have known about it for thousands of years. And they call that the source of all

of all humanity and knowledge and spirit and the mind-body interface and all of it, like they see that as the core. Guess what? We just caught up, right? So it's really interesting because we're finally starting to, like what Western science's most exciting developments are actually proving out things that indigenous cultures have known about forever.

Which is not only insane, it goes back to this idea that when we place an emphasis on how we feel and intuiting and like experiencing versus knowing, we can...

know just as much, you know, potentially or more. I mean, and that gets me to last thing I want to mention was the technology that you and your team created. Apollo is that experiencing it is not knowledge that is experiencing. And I got to admit, when I saw it, everybody knows that I've struggled with anxiety and panic attacks around my life. And this thing kind of said we can help. And I was like,

I don't know. I wear a thing and it like vibrates and I feel better. This you're just going to take my money. And then we talked more and I was like,

Okay. This seems incredible. Tell us what that is. So, uh, so basically Apollo is wearable sound waves that we discovered it in my research at the university of Pittsburgh that, uh, to treat originally to treat PTSD and veterans and, uh, through this bottom up learning process of calming the body. And if you calm the body, will the body remember that feeling and try to replicate it basically because

Because it remembers that feeling calm in your body and safe in your body feels good. And the best way to understand it that we've all probably had these experiences is have you ever had like a really hard or bad day and all of a sudden you get in your car or you go home and somebody you like gives you a hug or your favorite song comes on or both at the same time and you instantly feel better? Yes. And then kind of forget you were having a bad day? Yeah. Yeah.

So that has never been adequately explained by neuroscience. But what's happening and what we have now, the way we understand that now is that the experience you're having when you get that hug or hear your favorite song come on is that it's rapidly inducing a state of feeling safe in your body because you're experiencing a familiar safe stimulation to the body that's closer than the stress that happened before. Right.

Right. So the stress that happened before is in the past. It's not right there anymore. In many, in most cases, it's not right there in the moment with you. It's something that happened before. And we're just continuing to think about it. All of a sudden, somebody, you know, you hear your favorite song come on or somebody gives you a hug and you're brought instantly back into your body and your body's reminded that it's safe through the experience itself.

of experiencing a safe, maybe nostalgic, familiar thing. And that increases, guess what? Vagus nerve activity, right?

And so if we think about it from that perspective, it's really like going back to this core, like bottom up understanding of learning, which is that if we calm the body, the body gets primed for learning and primed for recovery. And the body then starts to do the learning and recovery on its own. It's not that the stimulation is making the body do something unnatural that it doesn't want to do. It's just reminding us that we're safe enough to heal, safe enough to learn, safe enough to be present.

Right. Safe enough to sleep, safe enough to digest our food, safe enough to allocate resources to our recovery nervous system. And so what we thought was, well, if all these natural techniques that soothe the body can do this, like deep breathing, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, soothing touch, soothing music, if they can all do this and they all are acting on the same nervous system pathways and

And then I started researching MDMA therapy and I realized that MDMA is also working in the same pathways. Then maybe technology can help us get there. And maybe technology, if designed properly, can get us there on the go. And so we started working with sound engineers.

And figured out that by sending soothing vibrations to your body at a very specific rhythm that's in the base frequency range, like what comes out of your subwoofer, that you can naturally remind your body that it's safe enough to heal and safe enough to learn and safe enough to be present in the moment with whatever it is you're doing, which for lack of a better term, we call a flow state.

And so this is how Apollo works. And now you can, if anybody who's listening wants to try it, we made it free and you can download the Apollo neuro app on your iPhone or go to the hug vibe.com and try it for free on your iPhone, because then you'll get the felt experience of what we're talking about. And it's scientifically validated. Like you said, you can test it out for free. And so the Apollo neuro app.com,

check that out. And then it also, if you want, you can get the accompanying technology that you're wearing as well. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. That's incredible. Well, Dr. Rabin, this is amazing. Could talk to you for hours, but I know you got a company to run and people to help. Where else can people find you to continue down this path?

Well, if you want to learn more about my research and my work, of course, you can find me on socials at Dr. David Rabin on most social platforms, or you can find me at my website, drdave.io, or at apolloneuro is at apolloneuro.com, or you can go to wearablehugs.com, which is what the kids call it, if that's easier to remember.

And if you want to learn, just, you know, hear this continued type of conversation, I have a, the psychedelic news show, which is called the psychedelic report, which talks about all the latest and greatest things going on in the psychedelic space and, you know, helping address controversy that is confusing to the public because it's a very controversial area. And it's called the psychedelic report on Spotify and Apple podcast.

And then if you want to get a deep dive into human consciousness and how our brain works, I have a quarterly show called your brain explained, uh, also on, uh, Spotify and Apple podcasts. You could check out. You got a lot going on there. So we're going to link to those. Dr. Dave, super appreciative. Thank you for being on the show. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris.

A thank you to this week's guest, Dr. Dave Rabin. The episode was hosted, as always, by Chris Stemp and produced by yours truly, John Rojas.

And now to the quick housekeeping items. If you'd ever like to reach out to the show, you can email us at smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com or message us on Twitter at smartpeoplepod. And of course, if you want to stay up to date with all things Smart People Podcast, head over to the website smartpeoplepodcast.com and sign up for the newsletter. All right, that's it for us this week. Make sure you stay tuned because we've got a lot of great interviews coming up and we'll see you all next episode.