Ep. 89: Breaking Down Emotional Inflammation with Dr. Lise Van Susteren- Psychiatrist, Author, and Environmental Activist

Dr. Lise Van Susteren is a psychiatrist in the DC area, whose special interest is in the psychological effects of climate change. She has worked as a consultant to the CIA conducting psychological evaluations of world leaders, and has acted as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University. Dr. Van Susteren also co-founded the Friends of St. Elizabeth’s, a non-profit organization dedicated to the humane treatment of the mentally ill, and in 2006 was trained by Vice President Al Gore at the Climate Project to educate the public about global warming. Most recently, Dr. Van Susteren co-authored the book, “Emotional Inflammation: Discover Your Triggers and Reclaim Your Equilibrium During Anxious Times”, a guide to help people become grounded and resilient during today’s turbulent times.

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Show Notes

[2:45] What is emotional inflammation? It's sort of like physical inflammation in that, you know, when something is red, and hot, and hurts, it's very preoccupying. It impedes your emotion. You can't really do what you want to do. You feel upset and on edge experiencing the pain. And that's kind of the corollary emotionally.
[3:21] It was an attempt to reach people and talk about the many ways that we can address this and restore our health.
[4:31] This is more an experience that we're having that is contextual. So it has an interplay with our own temperament, but it's the context in which our temperament is playing out.
[5:22] It is a cautionary tale addressing what is hurting us and how restoring our relationship, a harmonious relationship with the natural world, which is, after all, where we evolved to live, is the only way that I think that we're going to bring some balance to our lives that can restore emotional equanimity.
[6:04] We are social animals and we create contact with each other. So that's one of the things that's written about in the book, is the need to be together.
[6:27] Water. That's the number one force in nature that calms us down.
[6:38] Water, more than anything, has a tranquilizing effect, a healing effect on us.
[7:11] When we see a broad horizon that's peaceful, that isn't interrupted by lots of jarring and unnatural shapes, and what happens is that activating the reward centers, it bumps it up to activating our opioid receptors, which are the body's natural painkillers.
[7:55] Natural shapes tell us, and this is fundamentally evolutionary, that we are in a safe space and that this is probably a healthy, biodiverse space where we are likely to survive.
[9:35] We are of nature.
[9:53] Nature has been the balance. That's our home.
[9:56] If we want to heal, if we want to feel balanced, we will have to learn to re-engage with all the bounty that nature has to give to us.
[11:17] The big issue that is bearing down on us is the climate disruption because there is nothing that will stop things on a dime with climate, that unspooles outside of our hands once we reach various tipping points.
[11:44] I look at COVID right now and I'm thinking to myself, what are the lessons that we can learn here to better understand how we need to respect nature and how we need to understand how much we crave contact with nature and with each other.
[12:07] When we hug each other and the pressure that we feel hugging each other triggers the release of a hormone called oxytocin. And oxytocin is the bonding trust hormone. It's what moms get a big dose of when they give birth. We even get it peering into the eyes of pets and we surely get it with a big hug from someone we love.
[13:35] There's a feeling of being conservative now in the true sense of conservation and to recognize that that really is, I think, where we find common ground.
[14:54] What we want to do typically in order to get along is to turn the temperature down on our interactions so that we can hear each other.
[16:33] If you look through your triggers, sometimes you can understand.
[18:15] Every single cell in our body has a clock.
[20:29] People were coming in with lives that were out of sync with how we were designed to be.
[22:48] We're breaking the rules and expecting a different outcome.
[23:18] So what happens is when all of a sudden you feel inflamed, or you want to withdraw, or you feel frantically activated, or just deeply anxious or some other emotion, doesn't matter. What's really important is to take those emotions seriously. Do not cover them up.
[24:12] And in our brains, there's this, the limbic system. That place remembers everything. Whether we're conscious of it or not is another story. We can be deeply unconscious of stuff that we remember. Do not suppress that, but put on your detective hat and go looking. What just happened? What comes to my mind that reminds me of what just happened and then say to yourself, ah, as you stumble around kind of in the dark looking for what it was, piece it together.
[24:50] Don't wonder whether or not it was rational or not. That's irrelevant because your limbic is your emotional memories system and storage system and it doesn't care whether it's rational or not.
[25:38] So you've got both the open arms to be the detective that understands all these clues, and then you've got that really embracing part of your brain that says, look, let's work this out, let's reason this out, let's see how we can fix it.
[26:17] But if you feel yourself getting that strong emotion, that's paydirt. Go for it. Whatever it is you're trying to hide from yourself is obviously the very thing that we need to know about.
[26:34] The reward is by understanding. That's how we get empathy.
[27:13] Everybody has challenges. We all have our idiosyncrasies. And really what we need in the world is more tolerance and more understanding, not only of ourselves, but of each other. And if we can understand and be empathic with ourselves, we're much more likely to be tolerant of others.
[30:05] And so you have to look to see what goals you're sharing and why that common ground is something that raises everyone's boat.
[30:53] It's just a useful list that can help people to better understand and leave room for people to be different. They have different styles.
[33:38] The social psychology really of going from a bystander to an upstander requires two key issues. One is that we look at a problem, whether it's a human rights problem, a climate problem, COVID problem, we see that it is an emergency that has got to be made clear. We can't try to sauce it up with something sweet. We got to see it's an emergency. And then, we have to propose an act, something that we can do to remedy it.
[34:48] Countless research shows that when you drive up a person's anxiety with that first statement of here's the problem, unvarnished, I'm not going to sugar coat it. That when we take action to relieve that, when we take action as an antidote to that particular alarming news, that reduces our anxiety.
[35:27] When we lead by example like that, what happens is that it triggers that sense of a herd mentality, which is a survival mechanism in us to follow a good leader. And we can also see now that it goes from one side of our brain, which is focusing on our individual needs to what we can do as a group. And that very feeling gives us a sense of awe at being a part of something bigger.
[36:35] Awe is the only emotion, wonder, awe, whatever word you want to use, has a special impact on our immune system. It heightens our ability to fight off infection. It is a magic sauce like no other.
Thank you for joining us on Health Gig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.

“If we want to heal, if we want to feel balanced, we will have to learn to re-engage with all the bounty that nature has to give to us.” - Dr. Lise Van Susteren
“Everybody has challenges. We all have our idiosyncrasies. And really what we need in the world is more tolerance and more understanding, not only of ourselves, but of each other. And if we can understand and be empathic with ourselves, we're much more likely to be tolerant of others.” - Dr. Lise Van Susteren
“Awe is the only emotion, wonder, awe, whatever word you want to use, has a special impact on our immune system. It heightens our ability to fight off infection. It is a magic sauce like no other.” - Dr. Lise Van Susteren

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