By Lilian Sjøberg, Danish coach and trouble shooter good at seeing patterns, with a masters in biology, who has studied how to help people with Parkinson's Disease (PD) from a practical perspective for five years.
For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived in small tribes, and, like herd animals, survived due to our instincts. Our brain and body process information in a heartbeat and often decide to put us in a survival state. We may react with these survival instincts to sensory input, shadows, sounds, and tactile stimulation. Dopamine and adrenaline are essential in this process. After an alert, orienting state for seconds or minutes, our brains may make the subconscious decision to fight, flight or freeze. Eventually, after seconds, minutes or hours we return to a calm state again where normal body functions take over (digestion, cell division, reproduction, memory). Better safe than sorry.
We can observe the animal world to understand more. Meerkats in the dessert, for example, where alarms are constantly shouted over the herd, induce flights to the safety of the burrows, and then recovery, re-emerging for play or hunting food. This process is repeated many times a day. Better to alarm one time too many than risk death. Humans are similar, wired for moving back and forth between our survival instincts and calm states. We are just not very aware of this, and being in a modern society and disconnected from a tribe is masking this awareness even further, yet it remains the case that a healthy person will still go in and out of the instinctual survival state many times a day.
The problem is that today, when our survival instincts are triggered, we often cannot complete the process, because running away or fighting is not an option. So the adrenaline lingers in the body for hours, days, and even weeks, preventing us from returning to 100% healthy normal body function. This, combined, with the lack of many hours of hard physical daily work, with recreation in front of the television not helping, is slowly trapping us in bodies that gives us all kinds of symptoms. The nature of the stressors has also changed. Instead of the tiger, it is things like the terrible divorce, the lousy task at work, or the angry teenagers, which are the root course for our body going into its survival instincts.
In combination with most people's sitting still for too long daily, stress can now load our bodies with permanent chemical cocktails of adrenaline and cortisol. Then “symptoms” emerge and become a new normal. Each person gets their unique cocktail of symptoms.
Being in a half-working body too long can lead to all sorts of symptoms. An analogy is driving a car with more semi-flat tires on the left side all the time. We can drive, but side effects in the shock absorber and steering mechanism will slowly emerge. We can maybe change some spare parts, but the flat tires are the natural root cause, and if we don’t address this, more problems will occur.
“Star pictures are for stars what diagnoses are to symptoms. It is a grouping made by humans. The stars and symptoms do not care.”
Right now, we divide the symptoms into diagnoses of chronic diseases, but the root cause is the same. Some sets of symptoms lead to the medical diagnoses of Parkinson's Disease, but we can connect the dots between these signature symptoms and the survival instincts. So, we can also call it the long-term effects of staying in survival instincts for far too long time a day.
To help shake off the gloom about this, I call our survival instincts our superpowers, because it is a more resourceful way to look at the body and the problems we might be experiencing. Try saying "thank you, body, for keeping me safe, but now it is time to bring me out of the safe survival state and back to the normal range of health and grow." This ought to give us a little more faith in the dispositions of our body.
Fight, flight and freeze are the most potent superpowers (but not all) to help us survive. Our instincts can lock the body down 100% to avoid a dangerous situation, known as “death feigning” or “playing possum” in the animal kingdom. Things in modern life, from which we cannot escape, cause us to go into this type of survival instinct, but we seldom finish the cycle to recovery. We become trapped in intermediate stages that can lead to the permanent symptoms after a long term. So, the first signature symptoms of PD called freeze correspond closely to what happens when someone is frozen stiff by their survival instincts. If we are prepared to contemplate this, it is straightforward to see that these have the same biological roots and physical manifestations. Old idioms tell us about this shut down of the body, e.g., "to be frozen in fear“, “my blood froze”, “my blood ran cold”.
The second signature symptom of Parkinson's Disease is tremor. Tremor can be due to the body tensing up to prepare for the fight or flight, or the releasing of tension when the danger has passed. So, this symptom too is also found in survival instincts, especially in going in and out of survival mode. Old idioms tell us about this also, e.g., “shaking like a leaf”, “knees are knocking”, “ shaking in my boots”.
The third signature symptom, called stiffness, that people with Parkinson’s Disease (PwP) experience is also a superpower, which we will discuss in a future article.
The fluctuation in degree of symptoms is then related to calmness or a semi-instinctual states. With a lack of nuanced vocabulary, we say the increase in the symptoms is stress-related, but it is more complex. We often hear how PwP display increased symptoms in person-specific situations, such as going to the bathroom, crossing a road, being in a crowd, or queuing at a cashier, where a tiny signal triggers the survival instinct and puts the PwP’s body on pause to ensure survival. It can become a pattern as the triggers are enforced several times, so it gets easier and easier to get caught in this instinct pattern.
Again, we can look to the animal kingdom for evidence of this theory. Dog trainers know that a dog shivering or trembling occurs when the creature is experiencing too many stressors in a short time, and needing to relax in between tense situations. Farmers also know this problem arises in domesticated animals which cannot complete the cycle of survival instincts, because they have nowhere to run or hide. The same goes with humans, e.g. when we cannot escape from a bully, nor fight with an unfair manager. We too can get stuck in a stressful situation and start tremoring. In tense situations like eating at a restaurant, talking to strangers, trying out new activities, more tremoring can occur as nervousness or excitement builds up.
A situation like a soccer game on television can bring a tremor forward for PwP. Although there is no real threat in sight, the excitement of wanting to join the game and "fight" alongside a favorite team, also releases adrenaline. I helped a man with PD evaluate when to shut off the TV to prioritize a good night's sleep. He got into an excited tremor state due to his favorite team's soccer games. After a good match, adrenaline lingered for hours in his system and made sleep impossible. He got punished with many symptoms the next day, which was not in line with his job. He ended up quitting his job as he found it was also a root cause in giving him tremors in stressful situations.
We can demonstrate the increase in tremoring due to going into survival instincts in real time, by stressing a PwP out, e.g. by shouting at them. However, this is hardly ethical. Instead, we can turn towards video records from history. Every war had victims that exhibited symptoms due to getting stuck in their survival instincts, especially in the first world war where all people, young and old, were enrolled in the fighting. We can find on youtube several recorded videos, such as the one below, that show us the physical manifestations of the impact of getting stuck in extreme instincts. In that case, it was called shell shock.
Apparently, 15% of people in the war manifested symptoms due to staying long-term in the potent powers of survival instincts. The historical videos show a variety of movement disorders manifesting, including paralysis and tremors, and people even went blind and deaf people due to events that did not physically touch the person at all. Even office people that knowingly sent their comrades to their deaths could show symptoms of being trapped in their instincts.
Shell shock or PTSD can occur in young people exposed to a short period of terrible fear like a war. However, more subtle or prolonged episodes can impact us too. I have heard stories of symptoms arising due to: having a spouse who was physically or mentally unhealthy for a long time; a very stress related job; being a witness to accident involving a death; seeing parents fighting with knives; living in a house that was close to demolition; being hit by violent parents on a daily basis. The earlier the episode, the more insignificant it can look to a grown-up: a playful dog that knocked over a toddler; siblings teasing each other; a father hitting a child once as a punishment; being in an early theatre play; misunderstanding grown-ups talking about serious matters; parents demanding high standards for how to perform.
We can go in and out of instincts on a daily basis for many small or large reasons, e.g. due to a crow flying into our window, the mailman bringing bad news, our children getting a divorce. If it is a long lasting problem, it can hold us in instincts for hours, weeks, and months. For some people, we find that they have encountered enough subtle or terrible episodes during a lifetime, that it can sum up and result in the manifestation of a conglomerate of stress-symptoms unique to that person.
In summary, it is not just animals and people in history who experience the triggering of the instincts every day, and modern society is doing this to us in new and subtle ways which we may not be aware of. Unfortunately, the medical system is not very aware of this connection between symptoms and stress. This might because they are focussed on imbalances of chemicals in the brain, and on trying to cure the disease by fixing this problem. Personally, I don’t believe we can ever fully understand what is happening at the cellular level in the brain, since no simple formula or three-dimensional model can give us the understanding of the multi-facets of what is happening at that level. Indeed, a hundred years of brain studies have not brought us much closer to a solution, so why not clear the table and take another approach?
Instead, we have the overview of our knowledge of animal behavior, observations from history, and the real life experiences of PwP, by which we can arrive at practical things which PwP can do to help them. We will discuss these strategies in more depth in a future article, but here is brief overview:
(strenuous) exercise to burn off the adrenaline (but build up slowly, remember that it takes a month before your stamina equals this high level of exercise) three times a week 50 minutes in a sweating exercise like spinning;
natural activities to support mindfulness (social activities, hobbies, and awareness of the stressors modern life);
learned activities that provoke the mindful state (Qi Gong, Thai Chi, and the like);
reduction of the root causes that bring on the instincts (psychotherapy and physical therapies).
For faster progress, get help and support from skilled people. With ongoing work, 1-2 years from now, one will see enormous progress. Remember, it took time to develop this disease, and it will therefore likely take a similar amount of time to get out of these instinctual patterns. The effort is worth it when the alternative is rapid degeneration.
Discover more about Lilian Sjøberg, and support her work, including an online course she has developed for people affected by Parkinson’s Disease, based on five years of researching practical solutions and helping PwP.
