Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. A few days ago, I was doing the morning Accountability Call with the beloved Bright Lifer™ community, and one of the people who raised their hand shared an awareness that she'd had recently, which was that when she was coming of age, when she was a child transitioning to adulthood, but still a child really, but an older kid, she was sucking her thumb like she always had. She stopped and instead of sucking her thumb for comfort, she switched to eating addictively for comfort. She looked back on her history and her trajectory, and it really seemed like a swap at that point that she went from using her thumb as a source of comfort and relief and soothing to using food as a source of comfort, relief and soothing. I think she said she was about 10 years old, and as she was sharing this with me and with our community, explosions of relating were going off in my head and I was thinking, oh my gosh, me too. Oh my gosh, why do I never think about this? Oh my gosh, why do I never talk about this? Me too. Me too, me too. As a matter of fact, I sucked my thumb until I was 13 years old, 13 years old.
She went through the whole litany of the impact, how her thumb pressed out on her upper teeth and caused a big orthodontic issue and how she had to have braces and her mom paid for them, and that really it was the not wanting to let her mother's money go to waste. That made her stop sucking her thumb. I thought, oh, yeah, that didn't do it for me. I mean, I did get braces on some sort of scholarship. There was some sort of poor people's orthodontic care that you could apply for, and we got it. We were living kind of around the poverty line. Anyway, I got my orthodontic care cheaply, but they made me stop sucking my thumb, or they tried, and what they did was they glued these spikes onto the backs of my two front teeth, and it didn't stop me. I kept sucking my thumb with spikes on the back of my two front teeth, and I just got little vampire piercings on the back of my thumb, little callousy, scabby, bloody puncture wounds right there that just kind of hardened, and I just kept sucking my thumb. I mean, it wasn't that comfortable, but it was better than nothing, and I kept doing it even through headgear. I'm one of the kids who had braces and then headgear all over like a helmet kind of thing on my head with straps here to pull my teeth back because my buck of my two front teeth, my buck teeth were so pronounced that they had to pull them back.
Yeah, I didn't stop sucking my thumb until I was 13. For me, what did it was getting my period, and I think the awareness of coming of age of like, oh, I'm not a child anymore, and I stopped sucking my thumb right at that juncture, but I still bit my nails and biting my nails was a big thing all through my childhood too, biting them down to the quick till they bled, pulling the skin around them, chewing on the cuticles and the nails and the skin, and oh my gosh, I was so ashamed of my fingers. I remember riding the Muni bus in San Francisco and having to hold on to the silver post there and not wanting anyone to see my fingertips because my nails were so mangled and gnarled and bloody and peeled and layered and horrible looking. It was not till a lot long later that I quit biting my nails. Still, today, I have a nail that I will bite sometimes and shred it up and get my finger in my mouth and really chew on it. Rarely, but sometimes, I will pencil chew and pen cap chew. That's another thing, like wooden pencils in my mouth. I would just chew them and chew them and chew them until they were splintery and soggy and really gross. And yeah, pen caps too. The cap on a big pen with the little tail that comes down. I would just chew that and chew that and take the whole thing.
After this conversation with this Bright Lifer, I was just so bursting with relating, and I went and I googled dopamine release and thumb sucking and dopamine release and nail biting and chewing, and it turns out there's a whole literature on it that I had no idea about. There was even this article that was published, it wasn't an article, it was like a parent's magazine or something that said, thumb sucking is crack for babies, and it just went through the neurotransmitter release, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins. I did look through the scientific literature and I did not find anything about dopamine downregulation, which doesn't actually surprise me because what we typically see is that even things that stimulate the nucleus accumbens and the reward centers of the brain with dopamine, if they're at biological levels, if they're at typical levels that someone would experience in the course of a life like sucking a thumb or having sex with a partner, those levels of dopamine tend not to cause downregulation. It's the super physiological levels, it's the donuts or pornography that cause downregulation, the exposures that are beyond what you would experience in the wild, right? That's what causes downregulation. So, I wasn't surprised not to find any articles on downregulation, but in addition to just dopamine and serotonin release, there was all this literature on the reduction of anxiety and the providing of comfort and the slight suppression of the amygdala, right? The fear center, and just, it's so interesting to me how we find what we can, we use what we can when we're babies and children to self-soothe, release anxiety to get ourselves what we need. They're tools. All these things are tools.
I offer this for a few reasons. One is I'm just curious if you can relate, right? I think that sucking as a precursor to food addiction is a really interesting link, and it's also in the mix of why I recommend not chewing gum. Of course, there's artificial sweeteners in gum, unless you're getting the Turkish hard as tree sap gum, that really is not sweet at all. There is gum that's designed just to improve your jaw through mastication, and there is research that chewing is really important and helpful physiologically. It's really helpful and it releases all kinds of good things. That chewing is, I mean, I've been talking about it lately as something that releases GLP1, which is what those new weight loss drugs release, right? Mastication is very important. We're getting the mastication we need though when we eat whole real foods. I mean, that's the whole point of it. Again, back to the biological roots, is what you need to do is eat whole real food, which will require you to chew exactly the right amount every day. You don't need to chew extra, but I recommend not gum chewing in part because I think it's important to break that oral fixation. We don't want to be, as adults relying on these crutches where we feel like we need to have something in our mouth that we're either sucking on or chewing or frankly destroying with our mouth in order to be comforted, to feel okay to be soothed. When we let go of those crutches, it opens up a space that allows us the opportunity to really get curious and ask ourselves, what do we really need in that moment? Do we need connection? Do we need some sort of comfort? Do we need to address something that's causing anxiety in our immediate environment? Maybe we need to start working on a project that we're procrastinating on. Maybe there's a hard conversation we need to have someone in our life and that's causing anxiety if we don't have space to feel whatever it is we're feeling, we're depriving ourselves of the opportunity to take the corrective measures to really move forward in life. And so, continuing to have something in our mouth at all times to gnaw on, to suck, to worry over, is counterproductive to a life of real recovery from food addiction, from even if you don't identify as a food addict, just as a human being, as an adult. I mean, we are mammals, and yet we also have been endowed with the incredible ability to self-actualize, to strive to be yet more than we are today, and the thirst for that. So, oh my gosh.
There was one other thing I wanted to mention, which is that similar to this, there was research that came out a while back when the video game craze was taking off and screen time was increasing just that clicking a mouse, just the movement with the forefinger, and I'm sure with the thumbs, with the texting, just those mandible movements cause dopamine release in the brain. Again, it's so interesting how we will, as a human species just find and gravitate toward whatever provides a little bit of ease, and yet there are better ways.
Finally, I just want to wrap up by sharing another lesson that I've gleaned from all of this, which has to do with our story, our ability to look back at how our food issues developed or whatever issues, how our issues developed, and sometimes miss a key piece of the puzzle. Maybe because we're in denial, maybe because we just haven't looked hard enough, or maybe because, which I think is the case for me in this situation, we've just gotten used to telling our story the way we tell it, and there's elements we've left out. And so, when someone brings something up that we're like, oh, yeah, I relate to that too. It gives us a chance to cast a wider light on our history and remember all the different ways that we relate to each other, right? People who are gravitating toward Bright Line Eating® share a lot in common. And so, I released this vlog so that you can ask yourself and look back at your history, oh yeah, do I have a history of sucking on lollipops or needing to suck on or chew hard candy? I mean, obviously the sugar, there would be something else you were looking for in that instance, but there's no sugar in lead pencils and there's no sugar in Bic pen caps. Yeah. I just invite you to look, I know people in my life who are in long-term recovery, who still are struggling with the skin around their fingertips and having to wear gloves at night and really take care of themselves, so they don't keep destroying their fingertips, right? Oh, God bless us. God bless us all. Yeah, it's so interesting to look at the ways that we're similar. And if you don't relate to any of this, that's okay.
Maybe come back and watch next week's vlog. Maybe I'll hit it out from out of the park for you next week. But I suspect there's going to be a fair number of people that can look back in their history (maybe you) and say, oh, yeah, I did that as well. As always, we have the opportunity today to ask, what am I really looking for? What kind of comfort do I really need? Where am I being called to grow and stretch, and how can I get used to tolerating just slight moments of discomfort so I can be curious and find out where I'm really needing to go next? That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
