Krista Tippett: I want to just very briefly just know a little bit more about you, the background of your life. Where did you grow up?

Christine Runyan: I grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland.

Tippett: You actually started your career as a psychologist in the U.S. Air Force.

Runyan: I did, yes.

Tippett: How did that happen?

Runyan: So I actually come from a family of a lot of civil servants. My dad worked in the intelligence community, CIA and NSA, and I have a lot of West Pointers, actually, on my mom’s side. And my grandfather commissioned me. He was already suffering from Alzheimer’s at that time, so I think we pledged something close to allegiance to the Constitution. May have a little variation in there, but he commissioned me in the Air Force. And that is how I started my career, and actually my career with integrated care, which is bringing psychology, bringing behavioral health into the primary care setting — which is where most people access their care, the emergency room or primary care — and so really making psychology and mental health at the forefront of that, instead of as this specialized, very difficult to access, and stigmatized part of our health care.

Tippett: It also occurs to me that working in that sphere — both the call to service, which is in the military as it is in health care, but also the backdrop of trauma that is involved in that profession — I can also see how that flowed into the broad perspective and the kinds of things that you were paying attention to that lead to the perspective you have on the — almost the species-level trauma that we’re experiencing right now.

Runyan: Yes. Well said. I think it is a species level, and we trick ourselves, as smart as we are, as creative as we are, and innovative in terms of technology, that beneath all of this there is something that’s so primitive and inescapable. And as much as we try to, I actually think that’s one of the things this pandemic has shown us, is as much as we have tried to create so much connection — I’m using air quotes, “connection” — we actually see how insufficient that is.

Tippett: And so much has happened, both in the world and in our society and in individual lives and communities. But what I’d love to just have you open up for us, to start, is — all of that aside, just the nervous system effect that this virus in the world, the baseline with which we entered into all the things that then later happened — what started to happen in our bodies?

Runyan: So, you stop me, if I’m getting too — if I’m geeking out too much on the neuroscience here.

Tippett: I found it really — I’ve been geeking out on what you’ve been — I’ve been looking at your PowerPoint presentations to physicians, and I think it’s fascinating.

Runyan: Fair enough. So in our bodies we have this autonomic nervous system and what we call, often, our “fight-flight” system, which is part of the autonomic system, which is, in fact, automatic and which is not happening at the level of our conscious awareness. Threat is always detected by the nervous system. It can additionally be detected by our thinking brain, but it’s always first detected at the level of our nervous system. And it’s exquisitely designed. It is a beautiful evolutionary adaptation that, if we were to ever lose it, we would — we would become extinct. So its job is to keep us safe and to keep us alive, and so it’s really sensitive. And when it detects threat, it activates a series of responses, and this cascade of neurotransmitters and hormones go off inside of our body to prepare us — to prepare us to fight, or flight, if we estimate the threat to be bigger than we can manage.

And that’s a very predictable response. It’s our source code as humans. You have it, I have it, every one of your listeners has it. And when that goes off, it does a number of things. It releases glucose, so we have some energy. It increases our heart rate. It increases our blood pressure. It diverts blood to our major muscle groups. It temporarily gives our immune system a little boost. It stops our digestion. It does all these things specifically. You can see how that increases our clotting factor so that we can fight or that we can flight, and that we have all the reserve necessary to be able to do that.

And then our parasympathetic nervous system, which is often called our “rest and digest” or relaxation system, is also innate within us. And when the threat subsides, or when our thinking brain — our prefrontal cortex — sends a message that, OK, we’ve absolved the threat, or the threat isn’t here, we’ve just imagined the threat, the parasympathetic nervous system can then calm things down and bring things back to baseline. And that’s really where, when we are most integrated and creative and aligned with ourselves, and we have present moment awareness, that is our natural homeostasis of our nervous system.

Tippett: The balanced state.

Runyan: The balanced state. And some people will call that our “optimal zone of arousal,” if you will. And this window of tolerance, which does get quite disrupted, for example, for people who’ve had prior trauma, that window really shrinks, and so you can activate this nervous system at lower levels. And that’s one of the things that I think has been happening throughout this whole year, for various reasons, both related to the virus and related to our social circumstances in this country.

Tippett: So one of the things I’ve been thinking about and just talking to friends and colleagues about is how — obviously, just even as you describe that very clinically, it’s clear that here we are, a year on, and we never got to — the threat never went away. But what I’ve also experienced as I look back on the year and its many chapters, including the death of George Floyd, the racial reckoning and rupture, the drama of the election — it feels to me, in our work, in my work, my colleagues and I, like there was a lot of adrenalin that got generated at different points in the last year, because of things that were happening in the world, and that’s just quite apart, again, from people having incredible losses and stresses in their lives and losing people and illness and jobs and all of that. But just — you kept going. There was this energy source.

And then it has felt like winter set in, the election was over — I feel like all of the energy flowed out of my body. And it’s been really hard to feel even — it’s not just that I have felt low in energy, I’ve felt disembodied and like I’ll never be the same again. And I talk to other people who feel that way too.

Runyan: I think that’s also part of the nervous system, both assault and response. We talk about fight or flight, but there’s also a state of freeze, which can look very much like you’re describing — this state of apathy, of detachment, of even disembodied or dissociative, and numbing, a lot of numbing. And that is a state of physiological high arousal, actually; there’s still a lot happening underneath the skin, in terms of the arousal, but the body has essentially tucked in. And it’s a protective stance. There’s a lot of protection there. And anybody who is at risk of depression, has previous depression, it can be a scary place to be, because it has so many — there’s so much residue there, of, “Oh, this seems familiar — I remember when.” So it can be really scary, because it’s like, oh, is that coming back?

But it actually can be — if we understand that as a natural variation within our nervous system that may have a little protective factor as to not get into the rumination cycle where we’re constantly monitoring, “How is it now? How is it now?” and, “Is this coming back? Is it coming back now?” and to just know that that’s actually a natural variation of our system, too. And what is often protective in instances of such widespread trauma, if you will, has been taken from us in this pandemic: connection. Our nervous systems know touch. They know closeness and a hug. And to not be able to do those things when people are really hurting has been a huge loss, and there’s much grief there.

And I guess that is so much of my message, is if we can understand and appreciate what we are experiencing at that level, whoever you are, whatever you are feeling: “Of course — of course, you are feeling that; look at our current conditions,” and that it’s a normal response to incredibly unfamiliar, unusual, unpredictable, uncontrollable circumstances.