 Hello everybody. This is Lance Coyke and today I want to talk about your personal autonomic issues that you're having. So if you're not familiar, autonomic is a branch of the nervous system that we we don't really control. It's kind of automatic, you might say. Autonomics controls all sorts of stuff. It controls your breathing rate, your blood pressure, your digestion, your libido, etc. etc. Now I want to discuss how all of these things relate to what we do as people who are trying to improve fitness and people who are just trying to, you know, operate at maximum efficiency. So first we have to discuss stress and stress is a very general term. It does not mean things are good. It does not mean things are bad. It is merely something that wears you down. So waking up, I would say in the morning is a good thing, but waking up is also a stressor. If you stay awake for too long, you get really sick and you die after like 10 days or something like that. It's crazy. On the opposite side, sleep helps you recover. So now we can start to look at things in this little balancing act of everything. So working out really hard is a stressor, but as we recover from it, as we stop doing it, we make our bodies maybe more resilient and maybe the term is actually not fragile, but anti-fragile. We get better as we deal with all sorts of random different things. So and that is one of the benefits of generality of training, of doing all sorts of stuff to keep the body guessing as I joke about, but I'm kind of serious about. Those things allow our bodies to recover from stressors and grow stronger. So more types of stressors. Let's list a couple. So waking up is one, working out is another. We could also look at screens. Screens emit a lot of light and blind us. That is a stressor. Staring at the sun is also a stressor on that note. Eating foods that don't agree with your body, that's a pretty big stressor. Breathing in a way that is maybe not appropriate for the activity demands of what you have going on is a stressor. So as we respirate, we use our respiration muscles and those can get more fatigued. Those can get tighter. Those can throw off our postural balance and steal some mobility from our necks, especially from our hips, from our shoulders, from whatever you want to do. Enter the thing that is important to you. If you want to squat deep, then it's gonna steal your hip mobility. If you want to bench press, it's gonna steal your shoulder mobility, etc., etc. So stressors, let's see if we can list some more. Injuries, there's one. Infection, that's another. Psychological stress, a loved one dying. There's a big one. Psychological stress, someone breaking up with you, or even you breaking up with someone else. Those are all stressors. Those are all things that wear us down a little bit. Now what I want to talk about with your autonomics is that we have a certain threshold that we approach with these stressors. Most people can wake up and feel okay. So that's not putting them over the edge. That's not eliciting symptoms. But if we act up enough, if we stay awake long enough, if we eat the wrong foods, if we over eat there's another stressor, then we can elicit responses from our body that says, I don't feel very good. Why are you doing this to me? And to illustrate that, I want to now talk about this little threshold model. I want to discuss today with you stress and how stress works. So stress is general in our body and we accumulate to different kinds of them. So I like to think about things on a graph. So let's say this is time and this is total stress on the Y here. Okay? So later on down the line, more stress. So let's say just waking up gives me a little blip, right? My stress increases when I have to be awake. And let's say I do my morning routine. I have my coffee. I feel really good. Then I get a call from my mom. I wasn't expecting to get a call from my mom. It's a pretty good call though. So as we start talking, my stress levels go back down and we're all set. Now it's time. This is maybe eight AM. Now it's time to work. Let's bump this back up. Now I've got to solve my problems. Okay? And then maybe I work out. Ooh, big stress. All right. But it can be good. When I work out and I recover from my working out, generally good things happen. I get good chronic adaptations. But acutely in the moment, it is a stressor. Now let's say I drive somewhere and I get cut off. And bam, stress increases again. So let's say we have a threshold. So throughout this day, calls from my mom, waking up, I felt pretty good. But that little thing right there, that sets me off. Now my stomach feels wrong. Now or maybe right, depending on how familiar you are with it. My stomach starts to get irritated. Maybe I have gas now. Maybe I have acid reflux. Maybe I this coincided with me eating some sort of protein bar that doesn't really seem to jive well with my body. Okay, once I cross this imaginary threshold, then I might have a symptom. And that symptom in this case, in this example that I've given you is acid reflux. It's that burning feeling in your chest, not when you're exercising. Or maybe when you're exercising, because maybe the exercise puts you over your threshold. Now, this is an example and I've walked you through different types of stressors that can happen. But what you need to understand is that there are many different types of stressors. And these many different types of stressors can still accumulate, cross an imaginary threshold and produce symptoms. Now, when you're dealing with your stressors, what's maybe the best case scenario? What are the stressors that you can effectively eliminate and still grow stronger? Well, depends on who you are. Best case scenario, maybe you just walk around with a little extra tone in one muscle and less tone in another muscle. And when you reverse that, you detonify the tonified muscle, you make the tight things relax. And then all your problems go away. That's, to me, that's the easiest thing because it's easy to fix. And you just manage it with a little exercise. That's a best case scenario. What are some of the worst case scenarios, though? Well, worst case scenarios, you never find out what it is. And so you can never address it. You never find out what that root cause of all of your pain and suffering is. And that that can be hard. But as we've kind of talked about already, there are multiple things. So maybe it's not even just one thing. So consider that consider that maybe another worst case scenario is I have multiple things that are really holding me back. Maybe my body, let's say this, maybe the other worst case scenario is I have something that I don't know that I'm willing to change. So maybe your big stressor is you eat the wrong foods and you just can't imagine a life where you don't have dessert after every meal. That's hard. And from my perspective, trying to help you is very difficult. It's almost just we're going to do other things if we can and you're going to have to be okay with how you feel. What about some other stuff? So for me, I want to I want to draw on my experience right now. I have a an interesting facial structure where the upper parts of my bones have underdeveloped and it has left minimal room for my respiratory airway and my food airway. So I'll notice that I have trouble swallowing things. I'll get headaches. I have this little acrylic piece orthotic in my teeth to help stabilize my cranium a little bit help keep my neck a little more loosey-goosey. It alone does not fix me. What I need to fix all these things is I need to restore motion of the airway and motion can be in multiple dimensions. So maybe I need more width of my airway. In that case, perhaps I can get a somewhat minor but still surgery surgery where I expand my maxilla, my palate, my upper palate, my hard palate as we might say. Then maybe if the limiter for me is the width of this airway, maybe that's enough to help reduce my symptoms. Maybe that's enough to get my pain away, get my mobility where I want it, and you know carry on as I'm hoping to carry on. Maybe though it's not enough and then you need to take the next step. Maybe I don't just need width here. Maybe I need to bring this forward to get more front to back room. And so that surgery is then a little bit more involved and now we have a little bit more risk. How much of your face are you willing to have cut open Lance? The answer is not that much. So that's more of a more of a worst case scenario. Maybe you have something that is structurally ingrained and will be very difficult to manage. Maybe even so I started this asymmetrical pattern really early because I have allergies that have biased my motor positions all of my life. And so now as my bones were developing I have bony changes not just up here in my airway area but also you know my left tibia is externally rotated and my hip joint is a little retroverted. Those things I'm not gonna change so if those are the things that are limiting me then maybe I can go get a surgery that doesn't fix them. So I want to illustrate here that your autonomic issues may be complicated. I don't mean to discourage you. I just want you to understand there isn't always a simple solution. Sometimes your cases can be very difficult and what I would generally recommend is accept where you are right now. Make a conscious decision of what you're hoping to get out of treatment of whatever sort and then try the least the most minimally invasive treatment that you can generally that is exercising then that is sleeping more then that is changing your diet. Now I have all this stuff going on but I'm not ready for surgery so I start to change how I exercise I start to change what I how I sleep what I eat all of these other things and what I notice is that when I sleep poorly when I don't sleep enough I have the worst pain that I have my hips hurt the most that they ever do my neck is tighter than it ever is and I'm more prone to getting headaches behind my eye and my right temple here. Consider those things but I will say that if I can get my sleep dialed in and if I'm not exercising like an idiot and which you know is sometimes fun and if I'm watching what I eat not eating too much eating things that my gut agrees with then I generally feel better. So those are thoughts on your autonomic issues if I can help in any way please let me know but look out for all sorts of symptoms do you sweat early do you sweat a lot do you have to pee often do you have it something interfering downstairs with your libido do you have sensitivity to light do you have sensitivity to sounds do you have food intolerances all of these things can play into things and then you just have to evaluate each symptom on its own to help understand what's going on to help understand what parts of these are early developmental that you're probably not going to affect what parts of these are genetic which are also probably not going to affect and then rule those out and then look at where can I make the biggest impact