Ep 137: Mind-Body Unity: Two Doors Into One System

I have been fascinated by the relationship between mind and body for years. Of course, calling it a relationship implies two separate things. In this solo episode, I make the case that they are one system. The same playbook that took a football player’s shoulder from 45 degrees to fully overhead in minutes (without ever touching the injured ligament), is the playbook it runs in psychology and behavior – limiting output based on the perception of threat and safety.

Key insights include:

– Why guarding, inhibition and pain are protective outputs rather than failures, and why the same three show up in psychology as walls, withholding, and avoidance.
– The compensatory behaviors most of us carry, including examples like hyper-achievement, putting on the happy face, people-pleasing and the need for control, and what each one is actually protecting against.
– Why you cannot force a release in either system, and why every one of these patterns had a positive intention at the time it formed.
– The second door: research on entering the system through the mind, including Ellen Langer’s famous studies like Counterclockwise and the Chambermaid Study.
– Attention to variability, and how asking a chronic pain patient when their pain is better can loosen the label and restore a sense of agency.

Most of what we call resistance, whether it’s in a shoulder or in a life, is not stubbornness. It is a pattern of protection that has outlived its usefulness. And this episode is about how to tell the difference and what actually helps it let go.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (00:00.696)
Hello, Newfit Nation. Welcome back to the Undercurrent Podcast. Today it’s me here to talk with you about a topic that I am totally fascinated by and am really excited to dive into in greater detail, and that is the relationship between mind and body. And even in stating it that way, I’m falling into this fallacy here of.

Of talking about a relationship between mind and body because that implies that they’re different things. And as we will talk about several minutes from now, mind and body really are one. And so mind-body unity or mind-body system is an even more accurate way to say it. And I got very interested in this in large part because of my background, because of our work at Newfit, where

We are working with the body, with the neuromuscular system, and we have a lot of experiences like I’m about to describe for you. I’ve been in a football athletic training room and had a player who had a what they called a grade two and a half AC separation. And five days after his injury, he could still only lift his arm into A Bduction, lift his arm from his side only about 45 degrees because it was frozen and painful. Once he got to that point, it just body couldn’t move any further than that.

And I happened to be there and they thought it was going to be a four more weeks for him to heal because that’s how long it usually takes. So I happened to be there, did a demonstration with him, went through our mapping process with the newbie, scanning around to identify where his nervous system was guarding and inhibiting in response to the injury and finding spots on different shoulder muscles and and having him go through just simple movements, raising his arm, moving his scapula around.

He was able in a few minutes to get his arm to horizontal. A few more minutes, his arm was up overhead. And it was this amazing breakthrough. And if you look at what happened there, it’s not like eight minutes of treatment healed the ligament holding together that acromium process and the clavicle, right? That AC joint. It was the software rather than the hardware. It was the nervous system. It was the reason he couldn’t move his arm past a certain point, is because.

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (02:22.079)
His nervous system, his brain, his his system thought that it was not safe to do so, thought it was going to be threatening. He was gonna get injured worse if he did that. And so it held him in that zone of safety. By providing new information, we were able to help his system understand that, hey, it actually is safe to permit more to happen. So it wasn’t so much about adding new function or performance or range of motion. It was

simply about tapping into what was already there. And that’s one of the big keys here is that getting back to baseline can have this this energy or this resonance of of a miracle, of this amazing improvement. And it’s important to understand that in this case and others like it, it’s not adding new capabilities into the system, but but tapping into the potential of what was already there.

And there’s similar examples of this. There’s so many that come to mind. One is a volleyball player who landed on a on her ankle, had an inversion sprain, and was hobbling in on crutches. And after a 20-minute foot bath with the newbie, was literally able to jog in place and walk out comfortably. Again, same thing. The ligaments of that ankle didn’t heal, but that response to the injury and trauma changed significantly and allowed

Her to tap into much greater levels of function than she could 20 minutes prior. So there’s this notion of threat and safety. When there’s a perceived threat, the body is going to guard, embrace, and inhibit, and it’s going to create the output signal of pain as a signal to not load not area or to limit movement and reduce function. Whereas when there’s a perception of safety, the system will take off that governor and permit.

Greater levels of function and performance. So that is a summary in a few minutes of our work at Newfin and a big part of why the Newfin method can be so effective at helping people feel better faster, restore range of motion and function. And one of the most fascinating insights and learnings that I’ve had in the past couple of years is to see the exact parallels of this process.

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (04:45.171)
in the in the body, in the musculoskeletal, neuromuscular system, seeing the exact parallel in the mind and psychology and behavior. And I learned a lot of this through my experience with meditation. I initially with meditation fell into the same trap that many people do, where I thought it was a path to peace or enlightenment or happiness. And so I would sit there and and

try to perform that happiness or peace. And I learned through some teachers and great books and experiences on retreats and and different different experiences, learned that the pr real purpose of meditation is to have the awareness or the mindfulness to be able to meet reality. So that a has allowed me to better understand myself and my own

drives and motivations and understand when I’m acting from some sort of ego construct, some sort of arbitrary construct versus when I’m acting out of a sense of alignment with my true self and understand when something is more constricting energetically versus expansive and or expansionary. And it’s so fascinating to me because I’ve seen through this work and the associated exploration and reading and learning, I’ve seen that

The nervous system runs the same playbook based on emotional and psychological threats as it does in physical trauma. The same inhib inhibition and guarding and compensation freezing happens whether it’s a a torn ligament or an unmet emotional need. And the the same way that we talk about compensatory movement patterns with the neuromuscular system, there’s

Analogous, exact same thing happening behaviorally, psychologically. There’s compensatory behaviors. So there’s different patterns that you may recognize in yourself or in people that you know. And I certainly have recognized some of these in myself. There’s different patterns that show up. And again, I’m not diagnosing anyone with anything here, but these are some patterns that certainly show up in different people at different times. And I’m just

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (07:06.987)
Really fascinated by that parallel with the compensatory behaviors as compensatory neuromuscular firing patterns, we can call it. So, what are some examples of patterns? Well one might be one might be putting up walls and withholding or patterns of avoidance, avoiding closeness. And it’s probably pretty clear that in many cases at least, that’s a strategy to protect against the fear of loss or grief, likely influenced by past experiences of loss and grief.

There’s an example of putting on a happy face. Perhaps someone growing up when they were a child were in an environment where it was dangerous. There was an adult, perhaps, who had issues with rage, or it was forbidden for the child to express anger. Anytime the child expressed anger, they got yelled at, they got punished, they had a negative consequence. And so they had to learn to put on a happy face to not get punished. They did not learn that it can be.

Healthy and can even be safe in the right environment to actually express emotions. There’s also, and this one is something that I’ve certainly had in in my own experience, there can be a hyper focus on achievement where that can be a compensatory behavior for people trying to feel worthy of being loved. Perhaps there was a case where or a situation where a child primarily got their warmth.

affection or even their attention from their caregiver when there was a positive performance and maybe it was less reliable at other times. So there’s a a pattern here that can lead to always wanting to achieve more. I I certainly have fallen into that in my life. And another way that that manifested itself in my life is training compulsively, not being willing to rest. So I’ve I’d want to work out every single day. And of course that the

There’s many people who are the issue is the other side of things, where it’s being too sedentary, not being active enough. For me, it was more of that over overreaching, overtraining type of thing. And the training was compulsive sometimes rather than strategic. And so one of my biggest learnings has been understanding the value of of rest, of taking an occasional day off and that sort of thing. Other patterns, this is an another one I’ve had had to come to.

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (09:34.902)
understand about myself is people pleasing. People pleasing can be a way to avoid the fear of losing love or being chronically nice and agreeable to a fault. It’s often trying to avoid that specific moment when someone is displeased with with them. And the fear often goes back again to childhood, like most of these patterns do when perhaps the household had one person whose mood governed everyone’s

safety and perceived comfort. And so reading and managing that person’s mood became a survival skill. There’s also stories we hear about famous bodybuilders who talk about being a scrawny kid and being bullied in school and becoming a bodybuilder to become so big and strong that no one could physically intimidate him anymore. So there’s all these different patterns. Another one, perhaps a need for control, trying to protect against

Helplessness. It often comes from a time when something happened again as a child that the person had no say in. It could be an illness, a diagnosis, right? It could be parents getting divorced, a parent whose behavior was unpredictable, and they’re trying to compensate with that need for greater control. And so understanding where these compensatory patterns are coming from can be or often is a very useful part of the process of being able to.

to change the patterns that no longer serve us or are no longer desirable. There’s a a similar another similarity here. There’s couple that that we’ll talk about next. So one is in compounding. If someone has knee pain and their gait changes, that knee injury can also lead to issues in the the hip and low back, for example. Whereas with these other patterns like people pleasing or perfectionism, these short term adaptations can become long term

Pathologies. If someone lives their life out of alignment and abandons themselves because of that people pleasing tendency, or they never get anything done because of the perfectionism, that can compound into poor outcomes in life. And with with both the physical body, the neuromuscular system, and the comp compensations in behavior, you can’t force a release. In fact,

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (11:57.42)
It’s actually helpful to recognize that in both cases the pattern has a positive intention and it served a purpose at one point. The bracing guarding around an injury does have protective value as that tissue needs to heal. The problem is that it can oftentimes be set too conservatively. It can linger on after the issue, after the injury has healed. Likewise, the behavior that served a purpose in childhood no longer is beneficial because now in adulthood, there’s more.

resources, more capacity, and that that behavior is no longer helpful. In terms of how to address this, this the need really is the same. It must be demonstrated to the system, to the mind-body system, to the nervous system, that whatever the goal is, it’s safe to permit that activity to occur. The body has to understand that it’s safe to lift the arm

up overhead or that it’s safe to put weight on that ankle. And likewise the the nervous system has to understand that it’s safe to express oneself. It’s safe to set a boundary. It’s safe to go risk failure because that doesn’t actually mean life or death. The same sort of thing applies here. So it really is ultimately to work through these things the f a form of exposure therapy. One has to be able to to

understand where the limitation is and provide enough inputs that the system can start to understand that it is safe to allow greater movement or allow that change in behavior. There’s there’s all there’s one other point here that I wanted to touch on on this topic of these different ways that the compensations are similar between the neuromuscular system and between the psychology and mind and behavior.

And that is inhibition and and holding back really is in in in bodily movement is analogous to the way that one might be held back by limiting beliefs. For example, if I believe that my business can be successful and make this amount of dollars in revenue or serve this many customers, but my nervous system

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (14:14.707)
Is concerned that that might not be safe because that might mean too much pressure, too much exposure, too much risk, or fear of losing money and the fear of loss. It it could have all these different reasons why the perceived success that one may intellectually want is actually felt inside the body as unsafe. And so that inhibition might look like rationalizing ways to not try something or rationalizing not.

Changing your prices or not releasing a new product, something like that. It’ll feel very rational in the moment because it’s a very tricky subconscious mechanism there. It’s difficult to track down that sort of saboteur or the way that the system can be hitting the brake, but it is like sort of pulling the emergency brake, trying to limit you from doing something that might otherwise be perceived as unsafe. And one of the cool things about

exploring these different parallels is that it has helped me understand even more concretely and have an even greater sense of conviction around the work that we’re doing in the muscle and nerve business, right? We’re not really in the muscle and nerve business, we’re in the safety business, and everything else follows from that. And that framework helps us understand

ways to be more effective with patients and clients every day. And it also leads to this sort of foundational metaphor where Ellen Langer, I’ll I’ll give her some credit, Ellen Langer is a a psychologist at Harvard. She was the first tenured psychology professor at Harvard and has several famous studies that I’m going to talk about next. And I I love her most recent book

As of the early 2020s, it’s called The Mindful Body. Subtitle is Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. And she calls this book her idea memoir, where she goes through different frameworks and different ideas that she’s had throughout her career, and she’s done some fascinating studies. And before getting into some of those studies, I think it’s worth talking about her metaphor for.

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (16:36.203)
Mind-body. She she’s the one whose language I’m borrowing from when I talk about mind-body unity. She in this book describes a thought experiment. She’ll say, think about your arm. You can call it an arm, or you can look, zoom in, and call it a wrist, an elbow, a forearm. And if you move, say, your wrist.

Have you just move your wrist or have you moved the whole arm? Right? The the if you move any part, you’ve actually moved all of them because of that interconnection. The wrist doesn’t affect the arm, the wrist is the arm. Just the same. Thoughts aren’t something that affects the body, thoughts are part of the body. And this gives us an avenue where we do a lot within the Newfoot method of providing input through the neuromuscular system.

Likewise, we can be providing input through the mind. It’s like one house with two different doors. You can go into the same house through the front door, through the garage door, through the back door. I realize that’s three doors, but you get the point. And so there are many examples, incredible examples of entering the mind-body system through the mind door rather than through the body door. Or you could say,

Top-down rather than bottom-up. A lot of the work that we do at NewFit is bottom-up because we’re working with the body, of course, to help with function and pain and symptoms within the body. And there’s also on a related topic, there’s also wonderful effects on the mind, on the brain of working with the physical body because they are one system.

I’m also fascinated by some of these examples that I’ll sh I’ll share next of how entering through the mind door affects the mind-body system. And there’s really some fascinating examples. So these are from Ellen Langer and her students, who some of whom have become famous scientists in their own right, including Aliyah Crum, including Adam Grant. They’ve had gone on to have wonderful careers after being students of hers in her lab at Harvard.

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (18:53.195)
So she’s probably most famous for the counterclockwise study. And she has another book called Counterclockwise from I believe 2009, which describes this study where she had elderly men go on a retreat for a week, where I believe it was the year 1979, and they set up this retreat center to literally be 1959. They had

Newspaper clippings, they had news stories and TV and music on the radio from 1959. And they had the participants talk as if they were experiencing all this in the present tense. And after a week in this retreat, they actually had changes in their biology, their visual acuity, their their pain, their joint mobility, their cognitive function, their IQ actually improved and became.

the the same values as they would be as as when these people were younger. So she actually was able to show that these participants were able to able to be functionally younger, so to speak, by going through this experience. She also has done studies looking at at blood sugar, something that we think would just be so objective and virtually impossible to influence through the mind.

And this is a fascinating study where she actually had diabetic patients who would are are used to measuring their blood sugar at different time points after meals to see their insulin response and and all that. And so she would actually do there’s there’s one category of experiments with a with a clock where they the participants would get a certain amount of glucose in a in a meal in a food, and then they would be in a room.

Where the clock would either run at normal time or it would be sped up or it would be slowed down without them knowing it was sped up or slowed down. And they, if they had a certain amount of blood sugar respon of insulin release and they had a blood sugar response at two hours post-meal, if they sped up the clock so that only an hour and a half had passed, or or an hour had passed, but it was, but they thought.

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (21:17.619)
It was two hours, they’re actually their blood sugar would be the same response even in in just one hour of actual time because they thought two hours had passed by. Likewise, if the clock were longer, the same thing would happen. So the perception of time had a huge influence here. And they did another study where they would give people the same amount of glucose, but it would be labeled differently. It would be labeled to have more or less glucose.

And even though they had the same amount, even though the participants ingested the same amount of sugar, their blood sugar would be less if they thought that the food they were eating had less sugar in it. So there’s an amazing effect of the mind to well, even to say the effect of the mind on the body again is this sort of fallacy that they’re they’re different. The effect on the mind-body system by influencing the mind. Similarly, st studies that she did.

Tested people after sleeping for the night, sleeping through the night, tested their cognitive function. They did the same type of thing with changing clock speed. So someone would sleep for eight hours, but would have a clock next to them that made them think they only slept for five hours. And even though they slept for eight hours, their cognition was reduced, their memory, their cognitive function was impaired as if they had gotten only five hours of sleep.

She also did the opposite. She actually had people sleep for only five hours, but changed the clock so they thought they had slept for eight. And guess what? The cognitive impairments did not show up. They actually behaved and performed as if they had a full night of sleep and had full cognitive function. This makes me think of the the whoop and the aura ring, where some you know the the most common reason I hear people say they don’t use one of these. I do have a whoop on my wrist right now. The most common people I hear people say is that they it makes them

makes them feel bad or it gives them extra sources of stress. And there certainly are days when I’ve woken up and felt more rested and my whoop has told me I’m not as restored as I felt or as I would like to be. And so maybe I take it easier that day. But there is also the the opposite to that, just as many times where I’ve woken up and I’ve felt like, maybe I’m not that rested, but I have a green

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (23:37.196)
day on my whoop and I’m like, all right, I’m gonna I’m gonna hit it today. So it works works on both. Ellen Langer also did this other fascinating study with Aliyah Crumb, one of her students who’s now a professor at Stanford and has some great work of her own. So this is the chambermaid study. You may have heard of this. And this is where they worked with housekeepers in hotels who were physically active all day long, easily meeting in fact exceeding the

activity requirements for good health, right? The minimum exercise requirements for moderate exercise that that we’re supposed to get according to the government guidelines to maintain health. But they didn’t realize it. So they did the study where they took a portion, they took a group of these hotel housekeepers and actually told them, they educated them that their movement during the workday actually mimics

Movements that could be done in the gym. For instance, reaching and making a bed could be like a rowing movement. There’s upper body work from sweeping or running, moving a vacuum, et cetera. And they also educated them on how much movement they’re doing and how there’s positive effects because they’re using their body, their heart rate is elevated above how they would be if they were just sitting down being sedentary, et cetera. And it turns out that the group that received this education without changing their activity at all, actually had.

The health benefits of exercise, their weight improved, their blood pressure improved, all these other markers improved. Not from changing what they were doing, but from changing their perception of what they were doing. And Aliyah Crum, who was Ellen Ellen Langer’s student, who worked with her to perform that study, went on to Stanford and did her own study. This was a survey with 60,000 people.

where they asked about their perception of activity and correlated that with long-term health outcomes. And this was amazing because participants in this study who identified as being physically active had greater longevity, less risk of dying over the subsequent several year monitoring period, even if they were no more active, even if there was no difference in activity levels between them and the people who identified as being less active.

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (25:55.756)
So it’s just as much about the perception of activity as it is about the actual activity. It shows how important that mind portion of the mind-body system truly is. There’s also similar work on effects of the the mind on fatigue, where Tim Noakes had great research talking about how fatigue.

In many ways, is really a central governor. It’s the brain fearing that we may run out of resources or overheat. And so it creates the feeling of fatigue to reduce performance in advance of actually running out of energy or actually running into a problem. And Ellen Langer, in some of her studies, found that people start to experience fatigue at sort certain portions of the way through an activity. So she had people do.

The numbers are not exactly right, but something like 100 and 200 and 300 jumping jacks in different groups of people would do different numbers of jumping jacks. And they all reported feeling fatigue at approximately two-thirds of the way through. So that could be at 66 or 133 or at 200 jumping jacks. About two-thirds of the way through, they would start to feel fatigue, even though they were

Doing more two-thirds of the way through for the group that did 100, they were already doing more than the first group, right? And they were randomized. So what had nothing to do with fitness levels or anything like that. It has to do with the brain’s perception of how long the task is going to be and its desire to partition or budget energy. There’s one other one other category of her work that I want to mention here as we wind down, and that is attention to variability.

So one of the most important themes in Ellen Langer’s work is reducing the identification with diagnosis, loosening that label, because she talks about how identifying with that that label, that cancer diagnosis, or whatever the chronic pain diagnosis, or whatever it might be, how that

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (28:03.189)
Reduces health outcomes over time. And one strategy that she has that I love that I just found fascinating and brilliant was paying attention to variability. There’s, of course, health benefits to mindfulness generally, and that’s part of why this is so valuable. And if one is suffering, for example, from chronic pain, many

Of us listening, you know, listening to this, engaging this conversation, or in the physical therapy, chiropractic, athletic training realm, or dealing with people who have pain and injury. So if you have someone with chronic pain and they think, it’s my arthritis, or it’s this bone on bone, one strategy to use with them can be to ask them to pay attention to the variability. When is the pain better? When is the pain worse? What’s going on?

understanding that for for them to actually observe and understand that the pain is not constant, but there’s times when it’s better, that can help loosen that label of chronic pain because they don’t think, I’m a chronic pain patient, because in this moment I don’t have chronic pain. It’s actually a lot less. And it opens up the possibility also of them having a sense of agency and and a sense of control, which is vital for health outcomes across many domains. Because

They can start to naturally correlate, this felt better during this period of time. What did I do before that? is when I had a better night of sleep. It was when my nutrition was better, is when I moved, when I exercised, whatever it might be. Or when did it get worse? I did this. So they have some sense of agency and some say, some influence over when things get better and when things get worse. That also helps to loosen that label and give them that sense of control. And

She has great examples of this with chronic pain patients, where getting a text message prompt to check in on their pain multiple times per day over the course of a week or more, how that actually helped them with their chronic pain. There’s also examples of elderly patients who were prompted to notice how their memory is actually doing during a week. And by noticing that, their memory actually improved because they were able to see times when they could remember better.

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (30:10.091)
And that loosened some of their identification with identification with the label of being somebody who was losing their memory. So I hope you listening to this are as fascinated by some of these connections as I have been. And I hope that this leads to some ways to be able to be more effective in in treatment, in working in

physical therapy or in these different areas that you’re working. And there could be different ways that we do that. One certainly is noticing variability, is not being so adamant about labels, is using some language like people often require surgery with something like this, but not always. There’s times when they can do this, this or this, and there’s times when people do that. Helping to

establish the or broaden the scope of what’s possible. And I think also understanding s the the concept of safety and being able to help describe to people how their own systems will only allow them to do things that they perceive are safe and how to to communicate that that’s actually not a bad thing because that part of you that is limiting your movement

or that is limiting your behavior, it actually has a positive intention. It’s trying to keep you safe. It’s trying to prevent you from doing something. And so being able to use that framework to meet that part, to be able to have a strategy to provide inputs to help that person’s system understand that, hey, there actually can be elements of this that are safe after all, whether it’s movement or whether it’s a new behavior. I I hope that this gives you some

Some ideas and you have some epiphanies or insights like I have along the way. And I would love to hear an Instagram DM or comments on the post here. Would love to hear, or by email, would love to hear what stood out for you and what, if any, actions you have taken or plan to take based on the insights shared here.

Garrett Salpeter, NeuFit (32:25.472)
I thank you very much for tuning into this episode. And if you feel like this has added any value to you, this or other episodes, I would love to invite you to leave a review, to share this. And I look forward to seeing you very much on the next episode of the Undercurrent podcast. Goodbye.