Your birthday is the celebration of when you left the womb, but it doesn’t tell us how old you are. We can approximate by adding nine months. From the moment you are conceived, your development begins. Your birth is merely crossing a line from living on life support to living in the general environment. As we have seen with modern science, the age of viability — the age from conception at which a baby can survive and develop outside the womb — continues to decrease, because we are getting better at simulating the missing life support of the womb. Unless your life began at conception, there is no definable time at which it began, and it’s clearly not your birthday. The mystery of what is life is deep and profound, but the miracle begins at conception. That’s your real birth date, and that is when the development that shapes the rest of your life begins.
It’s after you’ve developed quite a bit that you are ready to be born, and that means your brain has already grown a lot. Then leaving the womb and being thrust into the big scary outside world is traumatic. All you’ve ever known up to that point is changing. You struggle to breathe, which you’ve never done before. You experience the pain of slowly being pushed through a small tunnel only to be poked and prodded when outside. In the womb, everything was cozy and wonderful. Or was it?
Your entire world…
Unless your mother had an idyllic nine months of pregnancy with you, unless she had no stress during that time including subconscious worries and fears that seem to plague most everyone, and unless she was extremely healthy during that time with the right diet and lifestyle, you were under some stress during the time you were in the womb. And if you were under any stress during that time, your sympathetic nervous system was activated and your brain was recording the stress into your developing brain. While in the womb, even though you have distinctive DNA which only partially reflects that of your mother’s, you are fully connected to her. If she is producing stress hormones, you are receiving them. If her brainwaves emit signals of fear or worry, you are receiving them.
Once you are born and disconnect from your mother, you are now receiving a lot of information directly from your environment. At first this information is confusing, but you are hyper focused on learning to make sense of it. But in the womb, your cocoon with a limited informational environment, you are still aware and still learning from that environment — it’s just the environment provided by your mother. The difference is a matter of degree: inside the womb you have a lot less information to work with. That’s good because there is a lot less of you to process that information.
So your development has specific stages. The first is age minus nine months to zero. The second is from about zero to six. During those two stages you do not yet have a mental filter to determine good from bad, right from wrong — you are basically a sponge taking in what is presented to you. These years form your mental foundation from which your filter develops. You have to start somewhere, and you naturally pick up from whatever environment is around you and learn to integrate it into your understanding of how your world works.
Ground floor
All this comes down to one important point: you are programmed by your environment right from conception as your brain develops — right to your core being. Even if you consciously reject fears and worries later, you can’t reject your core. You have neural connections made in your brain which are being used as your basis for your whole world, and these affect your whole body. These are foundational, and you can’t just dig up a foundation and replace it just because you want to while you have a building on top of it.
If we look at the first stage of life as being just as significant, formative, and impactful as later stages, we see it is key to how a person develops. We tend to overlook this period, especially in how it influences the temperament of a newborn, but research is clear that it has a great impact. Published in Psychoneuroendocrinology is a study conducted by researchers at Michigan State University on the impact of prenatal stress and its effect on infant stress reactivity and temperament. They started with almost 400 pregnant women in low income situations, many of whom were subject to bad home-life situations. They followed up the children born to these women with infant cortisol level tests at six months to determine their stress sensitivity. They did determine that boys and girls had different patterns of sensitivity, and that they seemed to develop that sensitivity at somewhat different periods of their gestation, but all had heightened HPA sensitivity — none escaped.
The HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) refers to how the body’s glandular system reacts to stress. The hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenal glands work together in response to stress signals from the brain to produce hormones to deal with the stress. In the brain, the hypothalamus receives the stress signals and releases corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH). CRH stimulates the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). ACTH then tells the adrenal glands to release cortisol. Cortisol then causes the body to increase blood sugar and energy, while suppressing less immediately vital functions such as digestion and immune system activity. HPA sensitivity means that this system is ready and primed to act on stress with hormones to suppress long term functions for the sake of short term energy and responsiveness — essentially the “fight or flight” syndrome. That’s great when there is a real momentary threat, but not good if happening chronically. The babies in the study had greater than normal sensitivity to stress so that even little things would put them into emergency mode.
Vicious circle
Societally, this means that the women, already burdened by poverty and stress, even domestic violence in some cases, would now have a very upset, easily triggered baby to raise. What happens next? The family degenerates even further. The baby is now born into an environment where stress, worry, and anger are prevalent, and the fussy baby is only going to add to the family stress. For the first few years of life this baby grows up with a lot more negative programming. For this person to develop into a stable, upright, and healthy adult is an uphill battle against all this programming.
There is much more research on the damage caused by early life stress. In a review study conducted at the Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami, Miami, FL, published in Chronic Stress (Thousand Oaks), researchers explain the known impacts of early life stress: “Early life stress has been shown to exert profound short- and long-term effects on human physiology both in the central nervous system and peripherally. Early life stress has demonstrated clear association with many psychiatric disorders including major depression, post traumatic stress disorder, and bipolar disorder.” They cite animal studies where decreased maternal care resulted in shorter dendritic branches, which are extensions from neuron cells needed to receive and process incoming signals. Another interesting finding was that, while in some cases of early life stress the HPA axis was overactive, in other cases it was underactive. Basically the animal brain was giving up and was depressed, so even danger signals didn’t matter any more.
Hopefully your story is much better and you grew up in a loving, stable home. But you would be rare indeed to have escaped this cycle completely. Even the best mothers experience stress while pregnant, and even the best home situations are not free from stress. You still have subconscious stress programs that are affecting you even now. As you can see from the extreme cases, early life stress, whether prenatal or in the first six or so years of life, causes significant ongoing problems throughout life. If you have even some negative experiences that programmed your young brain, you are still affected now.
There is an answer — replacing the old programs with better ones. Instead of programs of worry, fear, or rejection, you can have your subconscious mind circulating thoughts of love, security, and acceptance. And not because those are artificial, made-up thoughts, but because they are true. Sweet lies have no staying power, but truth does. We need to hear and know the truth.
Dr. Nemec’s Review
The major stress mechanism in the brain is the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. This is the way we react to our environment to protect ourselves because of early programming, and for almost everyone the HPA axis is either hyper reactive or hypo reactive, as seen in these research studies.
Hyperactive you
This pattern develops in most people that had a significant in-utero and (for six years of life), environmental stress from mother, father, and surrounding early environment. This pattern is sympathetic nervous system dominant, meaning everything is reacting in survival mode. That’s why it’s called fright, flight, fight mode. When you perceive danger in the environment that threatens your survival, you react through the brain, nervous system, neurotransmitters, and hormonal system, producing biochemicals and signals to put every cell in your body on high alert. In this nervous system response, everything is 100% all out because your life depends upon it. The problem with us is your physiology can only sustain this for a short period of time before it starts doing damage. You were only meant to run a sprint for so many seconds, and then you would be out of energy and exhausted. When a child’s early environment is one of sympathetic-dominant stress, it grows neural pathways in response to these stresses, but unfortunately this produces long-term detrimental effects. Some of these effects include digestive disorders, immune dysfunction, cognitive dysfunction, and premature aging at the cellular level. From the mental-emotional side, a person would be more hyperactive, more dominant, very easily distracted. This type of person does not rest well, has a difficult time relaxing because they are programmed for fear — subconsciously and consciously — so they’re always on their guard even if there’s no reason to be.
Hypo-reactive you
This is the end result of chronic over-action of the HPA access and having a sympathetically dominant nervous system for too long a period of time. When you send high alert messages for too long, the body can no longer respond to the messages. Remember these messages were supposed to be short term, for survival — not continual. When neurons over-fire continually, they actually begin to degenerate and die because of the inflammation buildup from excessive activity.
When it comes to your digestive tract, excessive reactivity over too long period of time that brings burn out always produces digestive disease. Some of the most common ones include esophageal reflux, heartburn, ulcers, colitis, leaky gut syndrome, Crohn’s, chronic constipation, or diarrhea. In the end each one of these can lead to cancer if not healed at the root cause, which is the subconscious and conscious stress programs.
When the reactivity is so chronic that it leads to a hypo-reactive system, this is when the immune system completely bottoms out, usually with chronic infections: bacterial, viral, fungal, or cancer development. Mentally-emotionally with a hypo reactive state, one can go into chronic depression because all the energy of the coping systems has been depleted.
How do you know if you’re affected by early life stressors? How do you know if you have subconscious/conscious stress programming from your early environment?
Signs of the environment
Here in just a few of the signs and symptoms of early life stressors stored in the system as programming:
1. Cannot relax easily, has a hard time sitting still, must stay busy all the time or are tired all the time and don’t want to do anything more than they have to.
2. Seeks intimate relationships, but does not do well with them because of distrust and self-centeredness.
3. Emotional highs and lows, or emotionally flatlined.
4. Nothing’s ever good enough, or doesn’t care about anything anymore.
5. Person hardly ever gets sick but when they do it, it’s really big — they get diagnosed with a major disease or are now sick all the time.
The other way to check for subconscious and conscious stress programs is to do advanced brain imaging to see stress patterns in the brain. At Revolution Health & Fitness we’ve been evaluating all possible stressors and how they affect the brain and the body and their long-term affect in health, disease, and longevity — for over 40 years.
Isn’t it time to find out what or who programming you?
The most important thing to understand is that these programs can be changed — they can be rewritten and you get a whole new outcome mentally, emotionally, and physically.
There is an answer to every question if we know where to seek.
