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Protecting our children (esp. daughters) from the harms of social media
204 Plays1 year ago
Today I’m speaking with award-winning author, Donna Jackson Nakazawa about her personal journey with childhood-trauma-induced autoimmune disorders, her career as a writer, and her new book, Girls on the Brink. She details how today’s environment, especially with the advent of social media, is harming children, especially girls, mentally and physically at a critical point in development. She also tells us how we can help our daughters and tells us about a simple way to heal.
The Life Detox is brought to you by bubbleandbee.com
Donna Jackson Nakazawa is an award-winning science journalist, author of seven books, and an internationally-recognized speaker whose work explores the intersection of neurobiology and human emotion. Her latest book, Girls on the Brink: Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and Social Media, was named one of the best books of 2022 by The Washington Post and Mashable. Donna’s other books include The Angel and the Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell That Changed the Course of Medicine, named one of the best books of 2020 by Wired magazine; Childhood Disrupted, a finalist for the Books for a Better Life Award; and The Last Best Cure. Her writing has appeared in Wired, The Boston Globe, Stat, The Washington Post and Health Affairs. She has appeared on The Today Show and NPR and is a regular speaker at universities, including the Harvard Science Library Series, UCLA Health, Rutgers University, Johns Hopkins, Learning & the Brain, Children’s Hospital Association, and the University of Arizona. Donna is also the creator and founder of the narrative writing-to-heal programs, Breaking Free From Trauma, and Your Healing Narrative, which help participants to create a new, powerful, inner healing narrative that calms the body, brain, and nervous system.
You can find her at donnajacksonnakazawa.com or on:
Instagram: @DonnaJacksonNakazawa
Twitter: @DonnaJackNak
Facebook: @donnajacksonnakazawaauthor
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Transcript
Donna's Personal Trauma Journey
00:00:05
Speaker
Emotional trauma in childhood can affect us in real, biological ways later in life. For award-winning author Donna Jackson Nakazawa, it meant being paralyzed twice and having to relearn how to walk. In today's episode, she'll tell us how trauma affected her health and what she did to get her life back.
Impact of Modern Environment on Children
00:00:28
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And how children today are growing up in a dangerous environment of social media that can harm their emotional and physical health. She'll also tell us what we can do to protect the next generation and heal ourselves.
Introduction to Donna's Expertise
00:00:43
Speaker
I'm Stephanie Greenwood and this is The Life Detox.
00:01:01
Speaker
When Donna agreed to be on my podcast, I was so excited. I ran over to the warehouse because I had to tell someone. Raquel was working packing orders and I told her excitedly that I booked Donna Jackson Nakazawa. She didn't know what I was talking about, but she could tell it was something big.
Understanding Trauma and Health
00:01:18
Speaker
Donna is an award-winning author and has written six books, most of which focus on how trauma affects our bodies. As a science journalist, she explains exactly how trauma affects our bodies on a biological level in easy to understand ways. As the tagline of her book, Childhood Disrupted, says, your biography becomes your biology.
00:01:43
Speaker
I had been looking at the rates of autoimmunity, especially among women, as most of us know at this point. For some years, I had a few wonky autoimmune diseases, but nothing too overwhelming. I had small fiber sensory neuropathy, thyroiditis, and I had a lot of heart issues and had a pacemaker from a very young age.
00:02:06
Speaker
But starting in the 2000s, I had recurrent issues starting in 2001 with Guillain-Barre, which is a demyelinating autoimmune disease. And I had it once in 2001, and I got better. But in 2005, I had it again, and I spent a year learning to walk again.
00:02:30
Speaker
And this was in the middle of finishing the autoimmune epidemic. And then I had a third long hospitalization in 2007 with a fallout from having been paralyzed. In that instance, it showed up as bowel paresis.
Mind-Body Medicine Exploration
00:02:46
Speaker
And so this was really, really a period of all together about two years in and out of bed and from complete disability and being bedridden to
00:02:57
Speaker
fighting to get my life back. And of course, as anyone who lives, breathes, works, and tries to navigate this life, the two intersected the personal and the professional in a way that came out in the autoimmune epidemic. And then after I finished that book and did book tour with very limited energy, it was difficult for me at that time even to get up a flight of steps.
00:03:22
Speaker
while raising young children. I did a deep dive into the next book, which is The Last Buscure, where I did a year-long experiment with the help of my integrative physician at Hopkins. And I had already done a lot of dietary changes. I was eating very paleo, very clean, almost keto. But still, even with that and the best medical care on the planet,
00:03:50
Speaker
couldn't get up three steps without having to sit down and take a pause. And we did this year-long experiment into mind-body medicine, a psychoneuroimmunology, bringing in serious meditation, a deep yoga practice, acupuncture, mindfulness, the benefits of nature, and really working to bring my stress-threat immune response
00:04:15
Speaker
down and switch that stress machinery down with the theory that by doing so I could in some way lessen that inflammatory cascade that leads to so many different inflammatory disorders.
Scientific Insights on Early Adversity
00:04:34
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And that was very, very, very helpful and transformational for me.
00:04:37
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Donna regained much of her functioning after treating her stress response. With renewed energy, she started on her next book, Childhood Disrupted, which I personally have on my shelf highlighted and earmarked because it is so full of detailed information.
00:04:54
Speaker
deep dive into the neurobiology and immunology of how early adversity affects the architecture of the brain and the development of the immune system across development, setting really a set point of well-being for us across the lifespan. And the relationship between early life stress
00:05:16
Speaker
and later physical and mental health disorders. She started on her next book, The Angel and the Assassin, which really details how childhood adversity affects the immune system.
00:05:30
Speaker
chronic adversity and trauma over time revs up the immune system in a way that creates this cascade of inflammatory hormones and chemicals. And we used to think for the longest time that that just affected the body because across neuroscience for a long time, it was believed that
00:05:52
Speaker
The brain was what neuroscientists call immune privileged, that all the external stressors are in our environment, whether they're social or emotional or an environmental hit from a toxin or physical harm, that all these what scientists call environmental hits
00:06:11
Speaker
We're really just impacting the body and the body's immune system because the body's immune system wants to fight and go, hey, this is fight, play, praise. I need to be ready to fight back. Or if it's more of an environmental toxin, you know, your immune system revs up to fight that. Or if it's an infection, your immune system revs up to do battle. And that all of that was happening in the body in the face of environmental stressors.
Immune System and Stress
00:06:40
Speaker
But in 2011, a group of female neurobiologists at Harvard took a closer look at that idea and they were able to show that actually, when there are environmental pits in the world around us, too many stressors, whether they are emotional or otherwise,
00:07:00
Speaker
The brain has its own immune system and immune cells in the brain called microglia manage that immune system in the brain and these little tiny cells, these microglial cells are really like the angels in the assassin's brain.
00:07:18
Speaker
They are the angels of the brain and that they run around helping the brain's neurons connect and neural synapses stay strong and healthy. But when there's too much stress in the environment or when the brain clocks a feeling of unsafety, these little glial cells run around like pac-men and they start to eat away at necessary neural synapses.
00:07:44
Speaker
including in the hippocampus, also in the prefrontal cortex, and in other brain areas. And when that happens, we begin to see the changes that show up on brain scans as depression and anxiety and other neuropsychiatric disorders.
00:07:59
Speaker
But the good news is that we know with lots of healing modalities that we can begin to see what we call neurogenesis, which is some of those cells in the brain, including in the hippocampus, start to grow again. And we can see neural synapses start to come back online. So there are lots of ways that we can begin to work with that from various healing approaches.
00:08:25
Speaker
And of course, that's really what makes me right, right? Is not just, oh my gosh, we know that when A happens, B happens, and it's bad, but also like, hey, this science really matters because we understand how, what, when, where, and why certain negative changes are happening from a scientific perspective. Well, we can get in on that, right? That's the information that we need to figure out the right antidotes to help the brain recover.
00:08:55
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In 2019, she started her most recent book, Girls on the Brink.
Gender Differences in Stress Response
00:09:00
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Before the pandemic, I started noting the really rising rates of depression and anxiety in girls. For instance, in 2019, a third of girls by age 17 were reporting one major depressive episode.
00:09:14
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This wasn't just a diagnosis of depression where maybe girls are more likely to say what they're feeling or share. No, this was public health experts looking at the lived experience of girls in their day-to-day lives and girls were saying things like they had lost all interest in their former activities, things they'd been interested in, they were no longer interested in, they didn't want to get out of bed.
00:09:40
Speaker
They had had a period of six weeks or more where they couldn't engage in their normal lives. And the words they used to describe these periods were hopelessness, fatigue, guilt, and worthlessness. And we've seen that number of girls facing depression and anxiety skyrocket before the pandemic. Now it's even
00:10:02
Speaker
And we've seen the suicide rate among girls and adolescent girls rise exponentially over the past decade. And so I wanted to dig in and figure out what was going on here. And to do that, I met with the leading neurobiologists in the country, five of them.
00:10:21
Speaker
To really figure out what was happening and imagine my surprise when I realized because we've just talked about a lot of the work that I've done that all of that reporting that I've been doing across my career on.
00:10:37
Speaker
how stress and adversity affect the developing brain and how that sets the stage for well-being across the lifespan. All of that research on stress and the brain had been done on male research models. Because we were only looking at the male brain, it's only very recently that we have this insight into the differences that begin to play a role in the development of mental health concerns
00:11:05
Speaker
only in the face of unrelenting toxic stress. I want to be clear.
00:11:10
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This is not a female vulnerability. All across history, we've used differences as a way to denigrate women or put them down or put their body parts down. And we're not doing that here. These sex differences, we don't want to fall into that old trope of when back in the times of Freud, they thought that the uterus was the source of hysteria because it wandered around a woman's body. And if she was sad, it was
00:11:39
Speaker
because of her wandering uterus and the cure was to have more sex with your husband. So let's be very mindful here that the things that I am going to talk about when we talk about the research and girls on the brink are all only true when there is a plethora of toxic stress in a girl's lived environment.
00:12:00
Speaker
And when that is the case, such as it is for so many girls in the world we're growing up, they're growing up in today, that becomes problematic. It's that puberty that estrogen comes rushing in and estrogen is this super groovy, lovely,
00:12:16
Speaker
Wonderful hormone that gives women this added immune boost now estrogen we think of as like this hormone that has to do with mood swings and so on but it's so much more than that. It's a master regulator in the brain and in the body.
00:12:35
Speaker
And it helps women have the ability to do more on less. What do I mean by that? Well, estrogen, when it comes in, is the reason that a female can do everything a male can do in 16, 18 hours a day, but also do it all in usually a smaller body with smaller organs while still making room for a uterus and carrying another life.
00:13:01
Speaker
That added immune boost, that added revved up engine, so to speak, is an evolutionary advantage. And in normal, healthy circumstances, that's great. It's an evolutionary advantage across time to help females keep young, healthy, and alive during those first months and years of life.
00:13:25
Speaker
But when the environment is unhealthy and very stressful, that can lead to kind of an over-revving of the body and brain stress machinery. And that is the reason why we see autoimmune disease strikes females at such a higher rate
00:13:44
Speaker
then autoimmune diseases strike men. It's that over-revved-up stress-threat response that is protected and is the reason why every female on this planet's ancestors survived so that she is sitting here today because she was able to protect the next generation and the next generation so that they're sitting here. But it has an evolutionary disadvantage, as we said,
00:14:11
Speaker
And that is that when the brain feels unsafe, over time, our immune systems developed in lockstep with our perception of safety.
Modern Stressors on Brain Development
00:14:25
Speaker
So going way, way back in time and hunter-gatherer times, close collaboration was really essential in the tribe. You needed other people to like you and want to hang with you to have food and fire and protection.
00:14:43
Speaker
Even the smallest sign of being dissed or dismissed or made fun of or somebody just rolling their eyes at you across the communal fire was a sign that you might be laughed out or pushed aside or ostracized.
00:14:57
Speaker
And if you were pushed to the side of the tribe, you were more likely to be the first person to be picked off by a predator or a warring tribe or not get the good meat on the fire. And you and your offspring might start to be at risk of physical harm, right? If you're wounded by a predator or a warring tribe or starving, eventually the body is going to take a hit.
00:15:25
Speaker
And so over time, we evolved so that the first sign of a social or emotional threat
00:15:33
Speaker
Our immune system prepares for physical danger. Now, at puberty, girls, all kids are facing a ton of stressors in today's world. We have higher benchmarks for academics and extracurriculars and sports, all of which is happening for kids with a lot of external evaluation and judgment based on performance. And that's all happening at earlier ages. Plus, we have a world heating up
00:16:01
Speaker
environmentally, socially, politically, climate change, politics,
00:16:07
Speaker
school shootings, and we've brought in the advent of social media, which is bringing in this external critiquing judgmental evaluation right at this moment for girls. When estrogen is coming online, the brain is being completely reorganized thanks to puberty. The brain is being completely remodeled based on one question, how safe am I?
00:16:33
Speaker
And that means we have a problem. If the brain is remodeling at puberty for girls based on how safe they feel and they don't feel safe and estrogen is surging in, causing in unsafe environments, this overflux of a stress immune response, that is going to lead to changes in the body and in neuroinflammation in the brain.
Supporting Children Through Stress
00:17:02
Speaker
that are going to manifest as mental and physical health disorders for a generation. When we come back from the break, Donna Jackson Nakazawa will tell us how we can support our daughters so they can grow with resiliency and fight off the potential health effects that this chronic stress can create. And she'll tell us her unique approach to healing ourselves.
00:17:33
Speaker
If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider checking out bubbleandb.com. We have more than 150 different products to choose from like soaps, insect repellent, facial care, and the world's largest selection of USDA certified organic deodorants. These are all products I've formulated myself to avoid xenoestrogens and not interfere with our hormone health. And we make everything in our own facility so we know exactly what's going in our products.
00:17:58
Speaker
So if you'd like to support this podcast, visit bubbleandb.com. That's bubbleandb.com. What are some of the things that we can do to support our children?
00:18:18
Speaker
Oh, yeah. So there are 15 antidotes in the book, which are really neuroprotective ways, strategies that we can use to help our kids thrive. And you won't be surprised to hear me say that the first tranche of them begin with you as the parent, right? The work starts with you. There's no way around that until you begin to understand the crucial importance of doing your own work and being
00:18:47
Speaker
that safe, regulated adult with whom a child can feel safe, seen, and that they matter and that they belong, that work must come first. There is simply no way to go through this process of all of these neuroprotective strategies if we don't begin in that first small sphere of a girl's world, which is her life with her primary caregivers.
00:19:16
Speaker
So that begins with understanding that we need to be able to do the work to provide that co-regulatory state or what we call parent-child attunement, where kind of every cell of you is like doing the work to calm down. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying it's easy. Doing that work to come back to center, to calm down, so that every selling you can offer up that calm
00:19:44
Speaker
to every cell in your child, wherever they are, however old they are. This is the work that we have to do as parents because we know that when we can do this imperfectly,
00:19:56
Speaker
but that when we are working toward it, and this is the thing that we are coming closer to in our journey as parents, that this is the single most protective thing that we can provide for our child.
Healing Through Narrative Writing
00:20:09
Speaker
And over time, when we can provide that parent-child attunement, this great thing happens where we build the conditions so that our child can come to us when really difficult things are happening because
00:20:22
Speaker
things will happen. And research shows Christina Bethel's Center at Hopkins has shown that kids who can come to a caregiver and talk to them about anything are 12 times more likely to flourish. So wrap your head around that and what it might mean for you to become that person.
00:20:41
Speaker
So it isn't just down to parents. You know, we, this is not a reason to go like now beat yourself up for everything you ever said or did wrong. Cause we all did that. We've done it a million times. This isn't about self judgment. It's about starting that journey and we can start wherever we are to become more of that parent that's offering parent child attunement, but we can only do it by actually looking at our own reactions, our own story, our own triggers.
00:21:12
Speaker
and doing the work so that we can move out of that personal mental vortex in life's difficult moments and offer our child that safe, stable listening ear. So let's talk about breaking free from trauma. All of this talk about trauma and how it affects our bodies and our brains. There is hope. There are so many beautiful healing modalities out there, and this is one that you've developed.
00:21:40
Speaker
Right. So I've developed a program, a narrative writing program that I've taught at a lot of universities and med schools and to psychotherapists and individuals can also take it now because I've created an online program, a very short course that takes 45 minutes a day for three days.
00:22:02
Speaker
And I call it breaking free from trauma because it's using a very well studied process of narrative writing, which over the pandemic, a bunch of researchers decided to look at the power of narrative writing and helping to bring down this stress threat response. And what they found was really, really, really powerful in the ability of using writing to heal through the right prompts and the right exercises and hitting the right safe progression, right?
00:22:31
Speaker
to rewrite this internal dialogue and this internal fight-flight freeze-driven story. So I wanted to make this available to everyone because I think it's a vastly underutilized tool in the healing toolbox.
00:22:48
Speaker
and to make it accessible, not just through universities or through medical programs. I'm really excited. I just launched this two and a half to three hour, depending how long you want it to take you, three day weekender program called Breaking Free From Trauma to help people get in to understanding their own story and rewriting it in a way that makes it
00:23:13
Speaker
faster, funner, more uplifting, and more powerfully helpful to respond to overwhelming stress in your moment by moment life so that you re-see your part in your own story as, rather than someone who is suffering or ill-equipped or unable, as someone who is your own
00:23:41
Speaker
healer. And to be able to do that through these tools that I've put together, through a series of writing, drawing, visualization, mindfulness exercises, sculpted in just the right
00:23:57
Speaker
pathway for the brain to begin to make a major, major shift has been really some of the most profoundly meaningful work that I've ever done. Thank you so much for talking to me today. Is there anything else that you want our listeners to hear?
00:24:14
Speaker
I think I would say that all of this work is really meaningful and also very hard and be gentle with yourself and know that it's okay whether you're doing this work as someone who's sitting here today struggling with an autoimmune condition or depression or a mental health concern or struggling with
00:24:36
Speaker
how you're parenting or just wondering how you're going to take some of the overwhelming feelings that you have about yourself or your life and turn them around into something a little lighter, a little easier to carry. It's okay.
Resources and Encouragement for Healing
00:24:53
Speaker
Many of us struggle with all of these things. You're 100% not alone.
00:25:00
Speaker
and feeling the overwhelm or the lack of having the oomph or the skills or even feeling some apathy or just not knowing where to turn next. A lot of people are feeling that way and just start where you are and put a tiny, tiny toe in the water in whatever way feels right to you.
00:25:22
Speaker
you know, read two pages of one of my books or do 10 minutes of my writing program, writing TL program or spend five minutes calling to find out if you can start therapy with someone you've wanted to start therapy with or whatever that is, please just start where you are because we, many people are suffering and many people are also having to go through this
00:25:51
Speaker
really what can feel like a heavy lift to begin the healing process. So break it down, start small if that's what you need to do, and try to set up a world of support around you in one way or another because you can do it. You can do it, you're worth it, and you deserve that love.
00:26:14
Speaker
And maybe if you've never felt that love growing up, it's really hard to give it to yourself. But I would just ask you to put one toe on the path today.
00:26:25
Speaker
To download Donna Jackson Nakazawa's Breaking Free from Trauma program, or to buy any of her books, visit DonnaJacksonNakazawa.com, which I've linked to in the show notes. Girls on the Brink was named one of the best books of 2022 by The Washington Post and Mashable. Her publications have been nominated for and won numerous awards.
00:26:47
Speaker
If you want to further understand the science behind how trauma creates autoimmune disorders and how to heal, definitely check out her books. It was such an honor for me to have her on the show. The best thing we can do as parents for our children is to do the work, regulate ourselves and to heal so we can show up as calm, secure bases for our children.
00:27:13
Speaker
But if you have a spouse or significant other who refuses to do the work, who continues to abuse you and create instability, unpredictability, and more trauma for you and your children, I hope you will find this as motivation to make some difficult decisions, as you might need a life detox.
00:27:41
Speaker
The Life Detox is produced by me, Stephanie Greenwood, and brought to you by Bubble and Be Organic. The views and opinions expressed are the speakers' own and do not necessarily represent those of myself or my company. Material and information presented here is for general information purposes only and is not medical advice. Being a guest on this show does not imply endorsement of Greenplay LLC or any of its projects. Stay well, friends.
00:28:14
Speaker
Next week on The Life Detox, I'm speaking with podcast host Regina Walker about her personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome. We'll look further into how trauma creates the hormone disorder and we'll talk about mindset shifts for healing. I hope you'll join us.