Can You Regulate a Craving Before It Becomes a Relapse? Addiction Recovery, Relapse Prevention & Nervous System Regulation with Dr. Deborah Rozman
Notes from the Edge
Dr. Deborah Rozman joins Lisa Lacey to discuss the physiological connection between the heart and brain, specifically regarding addiction re
Key takeaways
- The amygdala acts as an emotional memory center that scans for familiar patterns, which can include destructive addictive behaviors during stress.
- Neurocardiology reveals the heart contains its own intrinsic nervous system with approximately 40,000 sensory neurons.
Main topics
- Heart-brain communication
- Addiction recovery and relapse prevention
Notable quotes
The amygdala stores emotional memories. It stores habits, anxiety habits, stress habits, because it's always scanning like a pattern matching center.
Conclusion
The episode provides actionable physiological tools, such as heart-foc
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) Ghosted after the first date? We make the call you're afraid to make. The Second Date Update Binge Podcast. He Speaker 3 (0:07) kept yelling out, dude, yes, Speaker 1 (0:11) dude. Bad dates, big reveals, awkward phone calls. The Second Date Update Binge Podcast. Speaker 3 (0:19) Maybe I'm just being too picky, it was weird. Speaker 1 (0:22) Subscribe and binge today. If you dare. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (0:33) Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir, Notes from a Certified Man to the Edge. Speaker 3 (1:03) Hey, hey, my friends, welcome back to another episode of Notes from the Edge. I am your host, Lisa Lacey, and this is the place we have the conversations we should have been having all along. Guess what? You ain't talking about it. So today we're gonna, with our special guest, Dr. Deborah Rosman, and today we're exploring what happens inside our bodies before a craving becomes a choice and whether heart brain coherence and real-time HRV biofeedback, we're going to be explaining what all of that is, can give people in recovery another tool for their toolbox. to help in those really pivotal moments. But let me tell you about Dr. Rosman because she's been at this for about three decades now. She is a behavioral psychologist, business leader, president, and co-CEO of HeartMath Incorporated, which is an organization that has spent more than 30 years studying heart. brain coherence, stress, and emotional regulation. Friends, this was well before all of us were talking about emotional regulation. She has helped guide the development of HeartMath's research-based tools and technologies, including heart rate, variability, biofeedback. And friends, I did that in inpatient rehab and it was massively helpful. It's used in healthcare, corporate leadership, education, military, and professional sports environments. HeartMath's work focuses on what it calls coherence. And we'll be talking about what that is. It's a measurable physiological pattern associated with a more ordered heart rhythm and synchronization within. your nervous system. Its current technology includes the Inner Balance Coherence Plus. Guys, I have one right here, which allows you to see your heart rate variability in real time and change it as you're watching it change. It's so cool. Dr. Debra, welcome to Notes from the Edge. How are you today, my friend? Speaker 2 (3:13) I'm very good, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, Speaker 3 (3:17) I'm so excited about this, as you well know, and as our listeners know, because we've already been talking about it, September is recovery month, and we're wrapping up the end of it. And you and I were just having a podcast before the podcast, but it's Notes from the Edge, so we're going to dive right in. So I want to talk about what happens physiologically when Somebody in recovery gets stressed or overwhelmed or what we like to call triggered. And then they have that urge to the thing they've tried so hard to quit and might destroy everything they've rebuilt. So what is happening when we get stressed or overwhelmed? Speaker 2 (4:06) Well, that's a wonderful question because we've researched a lot of that at the Hartman Institute over the last 30 years. What is so interesting is that there's an emotional memory center in your brain called the amygdala. And the amygdala looks for familiar patterns and responds to them. So the amygdala is also receiving pattern from your heart, your heart rate variability. It creates a pattern with these beat to beat to beat variability changes in heart rate, which we can talk about. But it signals the brain through two pathways through the vagal nerve. One is the amygdala, the emotional memory center. And the other is the thalamus that gives us access to bigger picture thinking and higher cortical function. The amygdala stores emotional memories. It stores habits, anxiety habits, stress habits, because it's always scanning like a pattern matching center, computer chip for what's familiar. Okay. So remember that. So what happens if you have developed addictive behaviors, habits, whatever they are, the amygdala is going to scan for what's familiar because that's what's comfortable. Even if it's not healthy for you. And that helps explain why when we get triggered, stressed, overwhelmed, the HRV pattern gets very disordered, irregular, incoherent waveform. It signals that to the two brain centers which go into survival mode, fight, flight, fright, or the amygdala. What's comforting? Could be comfort food. Could be comforting in some other way that's healthy for you. But the habit of addiction will revert back to the craving or the pull for whatever you think you've been using to self-soothe or to comfort yourself, whether it's drugs, alcohol, gambling, all the types of addictions, food. And so understanding that's the physiological mechanism now, and our research does, what can we do about it? How do we interrupt that signal? And that's what heart math and your sensor helps us do. Speaker 3 (6:42) I love that. I love that we go immediately, if we don't interrupt the pattern, to what's familiar, to what we know, to what... we have trained ourselves to do if we don't use some kind of tool to, yeah, interrupt the pattern. So, and you know, I just, you just taught me something. I did not, and I knew a lot about the amygdala, but I didn't know that it was informed by the heart too. Talk to us about how important is Speaker 2 (7:22) the heart in communicating with our brains? It is critical. It's critically important in how we develop habits that aren't healthy for us. And it's critically important in how we self-empower and self-regulate to release those habits. Here's how. Speaker 2 (7:41) It was in the 1990s, and that's fairly recent, that it was discovered that your physical heart, your beating heart, contains its own intrinsic nervous system. 40,000 neurons that are sensory neurons that can sense, feel, learn, remember, and operates independent of the brain. And the researchers who discovered that formed a field called neurocardiology, because what they discovered is that the little brain in the heart is sensing how the body feels, putting together information from like the blood pressure waves and emotional experience. And because that's where we feel. We don't feel consciously in our brain. We feel in this area of our body. And there's a reason for that. But when we are feeling stressed, overwhelmed, anxious, that signal or that pattern of the heart rate variability is sent through the vagal nerve. To the brain. So there's a two-way communication system going on between the heart and brain. Most of us were taught the brain controls the heart. Speaker 1 (8:52) It's Speaker 2 (8:52) not true. It's two-way. The heart's also controlling the brain by the information it sends upstairs. Through this independent little brain in the heart, telling the big brain what's going on in the body. Speaker 3 (9:10) Our heart has a brain. It does. You guys are learning something new every single show that we have. So, Dr. Deborah, then that might explain how you can have something intellectually. Like you can know, okay, intellectually, I am triggered by this event. Mom, say for instance, just using mom as an example, mom triggers me. Right? I know that intellectually. But how is it that we can have it in our brain brains, right? Our brains, our heads, but not have it physiologically in our nervous system? How Speaker 2 (9:52) is that? Yes. Very important question, Lisa. The mind and the intellect and the cortical functions are a slower pathway. They're reasoning, they're philosophical, they're intellectual. But when the heart communicates the pattern to those two centers, the middle is a fast path. It's going to immediately, because it's a protection, it's a survival mechanism, it's immediately going to go, what emotional memory relates to this? And it's a pattern matching and it's going to trigger the desire, the craving, the habit before or even while your intellect knows it's not good for you. or healthy for you, or you've been there before, done that, been there, but still going back to it, because the amygdala's trigger has a hold on your emotional system. And so it's so important to understand, I learned this just a year ago, that a lot of... anxiety habits, whether they're due to addiction or something else, really create these incoherent patterns in the heart rate variability. And they're really based on an arrhythmia. And it's like once you start to treat the arrhythmia, the signal changes to the amygdala. So this PTSD, trauma, a lot of these deeply entrenched. emotional experiences get stored in the amygdala and they become a reference of how we view life and how we make choices and the cravings or the feelings. So back to what you're saying, we need to know how we can change that communication pathway between the heart and amygdala to a healthier response. Speaker 3 (11:46) I love that. I want to talk about, okay, so we now know how important the heart is. Talk to us about