ACEs contributes to the physical causes of mental health challenges
/In a recent speaking event about the physical causes of mental health, a participant asked an insightful question: How does a background of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Events) impact or contribute to the physical causes of mental health challenges?
The research around ACES show that the hormonal system, specifically the hypothalamic pituitary axis, can become over activated. This effects everything from the immune system to glucose control to brain development, and especially a person’s baseline response to stress. Despite knowing this, our front-line therapy for trauma is psychotherapy or prescribed psychotherapeutic medications.
While building the scaffolding of life skills, therapy typically provided often misses the most basic skills of self care for the body:
Sleep: 8-9 hours at regular and consistent times
Feeding oneself: eating regular meals at consistent times and the skills that support this (menu planning, shopping, cooking, understanding the importance of nutrient balanced meals)
Movement: How to physically play
Healthy breathing: practicing breathing through the nose
Practicing these skills provides a pathway for resetting the hormonal system, which provides a new set point for stress, entrains the pre-frontal cortex to being the primary driver for decision making, and supports the brain for wiring in new behaviors.
The ACES pyramid is useful image to capture the possible steps that contribute to mental health and addiction challenges. When we’re born into a family that has overwhelming challenges, such as poverty, community disruption, lack of economic and social capital, addictions and mental illness, we likely miss roll modeling of the tools needed to optimize our brains and bodies
Here are some of the things that might have been missed during a complex childhood, which may mean that the related skills were never learned:
Having enough sleep. For an infant to get 12 to 15 hours of sleep, there needs to be an adult around to protect and care for them. Getting enough sleep is critical for the development of a child’s body, and the child learns what it feels like to have the neurological and physiological resources to learn and respond to their world.
Having predictable meals, with enough nutrients, to build brains and bodies. It’s important for our circadian clocks, which are imbedded in our cells throughout our bodies, to be able to predict when we’ll get nutrients as well as sleep. This supports the natural rhythm of the hypothalamic pituitary axis, which helps the brain and hormonal system recover from trauma and reset itself.
Opportunities for physical play, indoors or outdoors. Play is the building block for using movement to help prevent mental health and physical health problems. It’s physical action that tells our whole body that we survived a threat and can move by our own choices. Additionally, there is increasing evidence that movement and emotional control reinforce each other.
Having access to nutrient dense foods with complex flavors. Experiencing food insecurity often means focusing on getting calories, or eating to survive, which means that nutrient-dense may be a luxury. This wires the pallets of children to expect foods high in sugar, fat and salt. If the sweet-bitter tastes of greens or the sweet crunch of carrots are foreign flavors and textures, they become rejected by the nervous system as not safe and limit the brain-body from the nutrients it needs to heal and thrive.
Breathing to support health, and not just survival. Neglect and abuse teach us to breath shallowly and through mouths. Shallow mouth-breathing becomes habitual, reducing the amount of oxygen available to our bodies and brains, and how we respond to carbon dioxide. Over the long term, this increases the risk of obesity, inflammation, glucose control issues, and reinforces the neurologically reactive patterns reinforced in childhood. Nasal breathing increases oxygen to our body and increase anxiety tolerance.
The research is clear that people can and do recover from challenging childhoods and traumas. Understanding that some of the basic self-care behaviors may be missing and intentionally addressing this issue supports recovery. Additionally, we – as a society – need to provide the resources such as food education, child care, mentoring, and financial support for families to learn how to care for their children as well as themselves.
