Do THIS Every Day to Rewire Your Brain From Stress and Anxiety

TL;DR

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris explains how childhood trauma creates a permanent overactive stress response, and how daily buffering practices like mindfulness, exercise, and therapy can rewire your biology.

Key Points

• 1.Trauma is your body's biological response, not the event itself. It's the ongoing physiological reaction to overwhelming stress — meaning your body continues responding as if the threat is present, even decades later.
• 2.Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were identified in a landmark 1998 CDC/Kaiser study of 17,500 people. The 10 categories include abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction; two-thirds of people have at least one ACE, and 1 in 6 now has four or more.
• 3.Four or more ACEs dramatically multiplies disease risk. Affected individuals are 4.5x more likely to develop depression, 7x more likely to become alcohol dependent, and 2.5x more likely to develop heart disease — even after removing health-damaging behaviors.
• 4.A 7-year-old patient who stopped growing after a sexual assault at age 4 revealed the trauma-physiology link to Dr. Burke Harris. The endocrinologist confirmed stress hormones caused the growth arrest, and talk therapy — not hormone treatment — restored his growth.
• 5.The younger you experience trauma, the more buffering you need to recover. Early adversity shifts the stress response's baseline (illustrated as a fulcrum moving on a teeter-totter), requiring far more compensatory intervention to restore balance.
• 6.Buffering is any intentional practice that helps the body return to biological balance. It includes safe relationships, regulated breathing, exercise, mindfulness, and therapy — all of which stack weight on the opposite side of the adversity teeter-totter.
• 7.Rat studies show buffering changes epigenetic markers, not just behavior. Baby rats raised by high-grooming mothers became more stress-tolerant and better buffers themselves — and these changes appeared in DNA expression, even when cross-fostered away from biological mothers.
• 8.An overactive amygdala literally shuts down the prefrontal cortex during stress. This is why people experiencing chronic stress struggle with executive function, impulse control, and motivation — it's biology, not laziness — and shame compounds the problem by triggering further isolation.
• 9.EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) uses bilateral stimulation to reprocess traumatic memories. During a session, the patient identifies a corrective experience — such as adult-self comforting childhood-self — which rewires the nervous system's stress associations.
• 10.The seven evidence-based buffering interventions from the Surgeon General's report are: sleep, exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, mental health care, healthy relationships, and time in nature. These daily practices directly reduce fight-or-flight activity and increase parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) function.
• 11.Daily self-regulation starts with the 'I'm here' principle — showing up for yourself the way a safe caregiver would have. Dr. Burke Harris begins every day with meditation and journaling to anchor herself in calm, so she can notice and recover from stress faster throughout the day.