Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I think a lot of us have noticed, whether back in the day before Bright Line Eating?, or certainly since doing Bright Line Eating, that in the past we have used food, not eaten food, used food to self-medicate in some kind of way. In this week's vlog, I want to introduce you to something called arousal theory. I used to teach this in Psych 101 in college. I want to talk about it and talk about what it is, how it works in the brain, and how it can help inform you as you consider the ways that you used to use food and how when you're living Bright, you will need to find other ways to moderate yourself other than turning to food. I think this is part of the journey of living Bright, is noticing all the ways that we used to eat, all the things we used to eat over all the aims and objectives we used to be trying to achieve by using food and learning better, more adaptive, more helpful, more targeted, more healthy, obviously, more nourishing ways to get those same needs met.
My guess is that the vast majority of you, you probably have not really learned about arousal theory, but it's a very fascinating concept. Here's the notion. We all as human beings have one big kind of seesaw mechanism that goes from high arousal to low arousal, and you've got the sympathetic nervous system on the one hand, which is the fight, fight, flight, freeze mechanism, right? You've learned about that, and that's high arousal or the parasympathetic nervous system. That's the rest and digest system that's low arousal. What's interesting though is that these systems are very crude from an emotional perspective. It's not that high arousals bad, low arousals is good at all. It's like there's this one system in our brain and in our body that can take things as different as being bitten by a spider, being on a first date across from somebody that you're super attracted to, and feeling all fluttery and a buzz from that to being on a roller coaster to just almost getting into a car accident or just driving 110 miles an hour for the first time on a dead empty road just to see how fast your car can go or whatever. All of these would be high arousal situations, but they're very different situations. There's fear, there's exhilaration, there's sexual attraction, there's anticipation, and from intense to less intense, from high octane to low octane. But all of these things register in the brain and the body as kind of one thing. It's like turning up the dial on the arousal system.
Then there's low arousal situations, which could run the gamut from being bored to being comfortable and relaxed to being drugged or sedated, to sleeping, to vegging out, watching tv, all sorts of things that are just turned down the dial on the arousal system. But some of them, when you're cuddling with your beloved that you've been married to for a long time and you're just lying there, snuggling so comfortable or cuddling with a cat or a dog, a pet, and stroking them, and you can feel their heartbeat and they're murmuring or purring or whatever, and you're just so comfortable, so relaxed, or taking a bubble bath, something that's truly nourishing to being eight hours into a Netflix binge while you're gorging on NMF lying there, practically comatose, not such a healthy state, but still low arousal.
So that's the lay of the land. It's important to know that this is a set of biological systems that are, they're polar opposites of each other. High arousal actually shuts off low arousal. Low arousal shuts off high arousal. You've got one or the other happening and you're moving toward one or the other poles at most moments. Again, not specific nondescript. It doesn't really say anything about the health or lack of health or the quality of the experience. It's just high arousal, low arousal, okay? So, that's the lay of the land.
Now, the thing is that generally speaking, the brain goes to great lengths to keep your level of arousal, moderate. Moderate. It wants you in the middle. And so, when you're high arousal, it works to move you back toward moderate arousal. When you're low arousal, it's going to seek out things that will inject a little spice because it wants you back toward moderate arousal. This is why if you've been watching TV for four or five hours, it might feel so fricking good to get up and take a hot shower, right? It's moving you back toward a more baseline level of arousal. This is also why if you've spent all day riding roller coasters at an amusement park, and then someone texts you and says, you want to go out dancing tonight, you might pass on that because you've already had enough, right? You actually might prefer at that point to spend an evening at home watching a movie on tv. Generally speaking, moderate arousal is desirable. The brain seeks that out.
Here's just a couple of added wrinkles to this. It turns out that in terms of our performance, like how well we're going to do in life at a specific task in the moment, the level of arousal that's optimal depends on the difficulty of the task. So, generally speaking, for moderate difficulty tasks, a moderate amount of arousal is optimal, right? For example, if you're going to help your kiddo with their math homework, you need a moderate level of arousal to do that. You don't want to be too sluggish, too tired, too wet, noodle limp, relaxed. You don't want to be too amped up either. You want to be kind of in the middle, right? You'll be the best tutor possible for your kiddo, and your kiddo wants moderate arousal in that scenario too. Now, to take a calculus exam though, or a super, super hard exam to pass the bar exam to sit there, the harder the task, the more a low amount of arousal is going to be optimal to help you perform your best.
At the very extreme picture, someone at the Olympics, right? We just had the Summer Olympics. Picture the people on the high dive and how right before they did their high dive jump, did you notice the lengths they went to slow down their arousal to close their eyes, to go deep inside to breathe, to bring every last bit of their nervous system into a state of low arousal? Because a low arousal state is going to produce optimal performance on the hardest of tasks. Let's go to the other extreme. What about the easiest of tasks? I mean, trivially easy. Let's imagine sitting there and folding paper in thirds and stuffing it into an envelope and then putting a stamp on it, right? Let's imagine you're trying to help create mailers for some cause, and you've got 5,000 papers that have to be put into envelopes and stamped, okay? And let's imagine actually that you need to perform optimally at that, as in time is of the essence. You actually need to do that as fast as possible. You need to be focused consistent and fast for let's say, 10 hours straight stuffing envelopes and putting stamps on. Can you imagine that you might actually want to have pumping music like your favorite dance party music pumping while you're trying to do that to keep your arousal high enough to keep your performance up? Can you picture that? If the task is stupid easy, high arousal will help you perform your best at it over a long period of time.
The last thing I need to share with you, just so you have the full lay of the land, and this is where you come in, is people's baseline level of arousal in their brain varies. Some people run anxious in their brain. Their brain doesn't have enough GABA. Naturally, GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. It dampens arousal, generally speaking in the brain, they don't have enough of that. Their brains, fritz and fry and twitter and twitter and their brains are kind of, we call this anxiety, right? Generalized anxiety. People with a brain like that, they're constantly seeking arousal, dampening situations and scenarios. They like to sit there for hours and watch tv. They might be more drawn to flour products that have a sedating effect. If they're going to become drug addicts, they'd prefer heroin to cocaine. They want to come down. They want to come down because their brain already is in a state of too high arousal. Naturally. Remember, the brain likes moderate arousal, and some people have a baseline state of higher than that. And so, they're always seeking scenarios that will bring down their arousal. They might not like amusement parks. They might not like big dinner parties. If they're introverts or they have some social anxiety, they're looking for scenarios that will bring down their arousal.
Some people have brains that are in the middle, great, so they can get more arousal, get less arousal, but they're kind of looking for balance. And then some brains run low arousal. They've got plenty of GABA on board. When they meditate, it's pretty quiet in their brain and they're looking for more stimulation from the outside. These are the people who ride motorcycles. These are the people jump out of airplanes as hobbies. These are the people who need to supplement their arousal by doing high arousal activities because their brains run low arousal. Their brains run not flatlined, because that's dead, right? But their brains run at a low hum, and they need a little more juice to get back to baseline, to get back to moderate. It's just a quick store. I'm one of those people. My brain is very quiet naturally, and I need external. I'm a hardcore extrovert. I absolutely have had my skydiving license. I owned a motorcycle in my younger years, and I remember this. It was in 2016, writing the first book, "Bright Line Eating." I was alone in a cabin in the woods on a writer's retreat for way too long and all that low arousal, all that peace while in theory being conducive to writing and editing this book. I remember driving an hour away to this grocery store, and I was driving like a banshee. I was driving so fast, and I had this loud Red Hot Chili Peppers music, pumping, pumping, pumping. And I kept turning it up, and then I started pounding my hands on the steering wheel and kind of screaming, and I was watching myself. Now, I'd been teaching this arousal theory lecture in Psych 101 for years, and I kind of knew what was happening. My brain was flipping out from an overdose of low arousal for way too long, and I just needed some stimulation. I just needed it. My brain needed it. That's kind of the equivalent of eating a bunch of sugar, right?
Sugar produces higher arousal. Flour produces lower arousal. Notice how you may have been self-medicating to maintain an optimal level of arousal, and notice that sugar and flour are not the best ways to achieve those ends. Nor is driving 90 miles an hour and screaming your head off listening to music. There are better ways, right? But turning on some high, pumping, fast, wonderful music and dancing in the kitchen while you chop your veggies for food prep. Now, that's a way to get some extra arousal. You don't need to eat sugar to do that. Taking a bubble bath is a lovely way to get some low arousal gentleness into your evening. You don't need to sit in front of the TV with a bag of flour products numbing yourself out in order to achieve low arousal.
Isn't the brain fascinating? I just love this stuff. I just love this stuff. So, as you go through your day and your week, and I'm thinking of the couple hundred people right now who are starting the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp and just giving up sugar and flour for the first time, I want you to look at ways that you used to use food to change your state, to change your brain and your nervous system. Notice that it wasn't the sharpest tool in the drawer, right? It wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. You could do it much better with consciousness, with awareness, not using unhealthy, toxic, processed food that you don't want to be eating anymore to self-medicate. You now have an opportunity in front of you to pick a sharper tool to decide consciously that if you need a pick me up or a slow me down, you can be creative and explore new ways to get that same outcome, that same result, to help you brain achieve the ends that it's aiming for, which is a moderate level of arousal. That's what it wants, is a moderate level of arousal. So now as you go through life, be thinking, have I been so high that I need to come down a bit? Have I been so low that I need to be picked up a little bit? What would do that healthfully naturally in a way that's joyous and celebratory? If you used to turn to sugar, maybe turn to play. To play, to dance, to laughter, and if you used to turn to flour, aromatherapy, a meditation track, a gentle walk with a friend, there's so many ways to change your state holistically.
Arousal theory, I used to love giving this lecture in Psych 101. I haven't taught Psych 101 now for a nine years, and this is the first time I've talked about this stuff in nine years. Super fun. Thanks for giving me this walk down memory lane. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. That's the Weekly Vlog. I'll see you next week.
