01- How we Got Here

Invocation to the Muse

In May 2023, Vivek Murthy, the acting US Surgeon General, issued a Surgeon General’s Advisory about the loneliness epidemic in the United States of America. Before the pandemic, the Cigna Loneliness Index, which is the largest recurring study of loneliness in the United States, suggested that 49% of American adults felt lonely some or most of the time. By 2020, during the pandemic, this number had risen to 61%. That is to say that three out of five people experience enduring states of loneliness as a part of their everyday lives. The report went on to say that loneliness, isolation, and disconnection was one of the underlying root drivers of mental distress, contributory to mental illness, and had an effect on people’s longevity equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day.

15 cigarettes per day: that’s a lotta cigarettes. The Surgeon General’s report points to a feature of contemporary American life that has been noted by sociologists for decades. In 2000, Harvard Professor of Public Policy Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Communities, published on the steady decline of bowling leagues in the United States as a key indicator of a broad drop in social capital in modern American adults. The book was based on interviews with half a million people: an extremely large data set. It noted that participation in these kind of collective social activities was dropping precipitously, with disastrous effects for people’s wellbeing. This phenomenon is not, in fact, all that new.

This is a real problem for humans, because we are social animals, and our wellbeing is social in nature. Lonely, isolated, and disconnected humans are unwell humans.

While it is fairly easy to look at a number of proximate causes for this epidemic of loneliness, including the obvious recent fact that social distancing during the pandemic made it very difficult for people to gather together, as well as the rise of first the Internet, and then social media, with more and more people spending time online and alone, there is something much deeper at play here.

Let us combine the awareness of this loneliness epidemic with the parallel observation that the data suggests that prior to the pandemic, 60 to 80% of visits to primary care had a stress-related component.¹ This is to say that 3 or 4 out of 5 visits to your doctor (your general practitioner) are either directly because of a stress-induced condition (anxiety, gastro-intestinal distress, sleep disorders, etc.), or exacerbated, made worse, by stress.

How are these two broad phenomena related? Loneliness, isolation, and disconnection are a cause and a result of the Autonomic Nervous System responding to threat. Stress-related disorders are a result of the Autonomic Nervous System responding to threat. The common cause underneath both of these epidemics is that modern people do not feel safe in their bodies.

If we do not feel safe, we do not activate the biology of connection. If we do not activate the biology of connection, the biology of defense does not turn off. When the biology of defense becomes our normal state, when it becomes chronic and non-resolving, when it endures…we become ill. Sometimes it happens quickly, and sometimes it happens slowly. But you know what? It happens every single damn time.

When the biology of defense becomes our normal state we become ill.

My name is Gabriel, and I am a connection phenomenologist. For the past 30 years, my research and clinical work has been focused at the intersection of autonomic physiology and awareness practice. One of the questions that I have been studying deeply and consistently now for three decades is the deviation in modern culture from an ancestral baseline and safety and connection and what we can do to change that. The question I am most keenly focused on in our work is how to help people turn on, and keep on, the neurological drivers of connection. This is of great importance, because the drivers of connection are in fact the root drivers of wellbeing.

I started out interested in the healing of stress-related disorders, initially because I needed to heal them in myself, and then because what we discovered was extraordinarily effective. The company that I direct has made profound breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of a number of them. But what is slightly ironic about this, or slightly revelatory, depending on how you look at it, is that the key to many of our breakthroughs in treatment came not through learning to heal stress, but rather learning to create the conditions in which wellness could fully arise.

As my trans-disciplinary study of the nervous system progressed, and as I received mentorship in fields ranging from autonomic physiology, to psychoneuroimmunology, to cellular metabolic healing, what became increasingly apparent was that our modern healing modalities are focused on pathogenesis. They are focused on the remediation of disease states. This means that their entire framework is conceptualized in terms of returning to a pre-illness baseline. But the problem with this is two-fold. First of all, the absence of illbeing is not the same as wellbeing. A pre-illness threshold does not mean that you are well. Do you understand what that means? Just as the absence of hate is not love, and the absence of danger is not safety, the absence of illness is not the same as wellness. Wellness is vibrant. Wellness is shimmering vitality. How many people do you know that you would describe as shimmeringly vital?

Secondly, in our clinical research, which is extensive, it turned out that there were two routes to treating disease. You can either treat the disease itself, or you can activate the root drivers of wellbeing, and allow them to change the internal context in which the disease process unfolded. The clinical reality is typically a mix of the two. But what we discovered that is of crucial importance, and applies broadly across the various pathologies of disease, is that a salugenic², e.g., health creation, model of wellbeing is as powerful, or more powerful, than addressing the specific symptoms.

Allow me to say this in a slightly different way, so that you can better understand. What we discovered, with stress-related disorders, which include anxiety, depression, gastro-intestinal disease, complex chronic illness, post-traumatic stress injury, many auto-immune disorders, etc., is that if we could create a pathway to shift the Autonomic Nervous System from a baseline in threat response to one of safety and connection, that shift in and of itself, which changed the global internal context of the client's inward landscape, effectuated the primary relief to their symptoms.

If we could get the client's nervous system to feel and register a felt sense of safety 51% of the time, the disease state would typically dissolve without us putting any further focus on the disease. Do you understand what I am saying? I need you to understand what I am saying.

In many of the cases where we achieved breakthrough outcomes that allopathic medicine declared simply impossible, and where we definitively shifted people from disease to wellbeing, we never treated the disease directly.

We helped the person shift the baseline in their nervous systems from being centered in threat to safety, and when we did this the interior energy processing templates and metabolic climate of the body changed so drastically that the body healed itself.

We didn't treat the disease. At all. We restored the wellbeing of the client. And then the client's body healed itself, because Nature is that powerful.

With respect to stress-related disorders, you can either focus on removing the disease, or activating the person's intrinsic root drivers of wellbeing. Sometimes, in acute conditions, you have to focus on the disease. Yet often, even if symptoms are severe, activating the intrinsic drivers of wellbeing does more to change the outcome.

This represents a radical reconceptualization of what we are doing in healing, and how we are doing it. It suggests the notion that the medicine of the future, which is in fact an ancestral future, may be better served by focusing on the creation of wellbeing than the remediation of disease. It suggests that we may have brought the wrong things into focus if our aim is wellbeing.

I was recently asked by the acquisitions editor of a wonderful publisher to write a book on the neurobiology of connection. Since it was his idea, at his direction I dutifully wrote a book proposal, entitled: The Neurobiology of Wellbeing: Transforming Loneliness, Isolation, and Disconnection at their Source. This he took to his editorial team, who informed us both that books on loneliness don't sell. He came back to me, and asked if we could write the book about healing anxiety, or healing depression. And at first I said, Sure. We can write it about healing whatever you want that is stress-related: anxiety, depression, social anxiety, gastro-intestinal disease, auto-immune issues. He wanted to focus on depression, and he told me, "Remember: first the problem, then the solution."

This conversation happened a day before I taught a multi-day workshop on Connection Phenomenology at our retreat center in Northern California. I was holding the architecture of the book in mind, thinking about its structure. And then I started working with a group on creating the conditions for safety and connection to arise between us, and I started to get upset thinking about the book. I have no argument with what the publisher is saying: problem/solution is the formulation that sells. The problem I have is that this is a response to a pathogenic framework. Notionally, I don't argue that this is how the world works. People come to buy a book about healing something that is wrong with them.

But at a deeper level, this is symptomatic of the same worldview that is structurally preventing us from looking in the direction of wellness creation to begin with. People get interested in their health when it leaves them, and then they want a particular cure to what is ailing them. But what about fortifying your health? That's the book I wanted to write. I wanted to write the neurobiology of connection as a health creation manual. And that, gentle reader, is the book you are holding.

If you are interested in understanding, globally, the power of your deep nervous system to give rise to the conditions of enduring wellbeing, you have found a manual that has the potential to change your life.

In this book, after some context setting, I am going to walk you through five doors, in a journey designed to help bring you home to who you actually are. We are going to set a long evolutionary context to begin to view humans through our lineage history as hominids, and then, in simple and approachable language, I am going to teach you about your Autonomic Nervous System. Once we've done that I will walk you through five doors. We are going to walk through the door of safety to open the door to connection. Once we've opened the door to connection, we will open the door to interoception, the sixth sense. Once we've opened the door to interoception, we will open the door to intuition. This door to intuition will open the door to relatedness. And the door to relatedness will open the door to enduring wellbeing.

Welcome to The Neurobiology of Connection. Take off your shoes. Take a deep breath. Put your feet up. We are going to journey together, back home to the ancestral hearth.

This is the complete first chapter of The Neurobiology of Connection. To keep receiving full chapters, upgrade your subscription or pre-order the book.

1. JAMA, 2013. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1392494

2. I came across the term salugenic, or health creating, for the first time when I read Dr. Robert Naviaux’s Mitochondrial and metabolic features of salugenesis and the healing cycle. Naviaux directs the Naviaux Lab at the Mitochondrial and Metabolic Disease Center at the University of California San Diego. In the article, he defines salugenesis thus: Salugenesis is the automatic, evolutionarily conserved, ontogenetic sequence of molecular, cellular, organ system, and behavioral changes that is used by living systems to heal.