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Ep. 37: Kid’s Immune System Isn’t Just About Germs — It’s About You: With Dr. Steve Cole

• Matt Lederman & Alona Pulde • Season 1 • Episode 37

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Your Kid’s Immune System Isn’t Just About Germs — It’s About You


🔥 What if your child’s immune system is actually responding to you? In this eye-opening episode, Matt & Alona sit down with Dr. Steve Cole, a pioneering social genomics researcher, to expose the invisible ways our relationships — and even our vibes — shape our family’s biology. From chronic disease to viral vulnerability, connection turns out to be a major health intervention.

😳 Dr. Cole explains how emotional disconnection, unpredictable social environments, and even parenting in “survival mode” can silently activate stress responses in our kids' bodies. You’ll never look at your child’s flare-ups or emotional meltdowns the same again.

💥 Hard-hitting truths we unpack:

  1. Why your child can feel safe and still be under constant biological threat.
  2. How “loneliness” — even in a house full of people — might be the most toxic stressor of all.
  3. What happens when your child watches you run on empty — and how your nervous system becomes a model for theirs.

Have a Kinectin Account? 🔗 Explore these Nudges to see how they apply to your own life — in a way only Amari can.

Nudge = Am I contributing to my child nervous system not being at ease? 

Nudge = “I feel like I'm always in survival mode, how do I show up different for my kids?”

What is Amari? webe Parents has partnered with Kinectin to bring you Amari, your personal AI coach. Now you can interact with the ideas from our podcasts, articles, and parenting tips — and Amari will help you apply them directly to your personal life. Don't have a Kinectin Account? Create one here

To learn more about what Alona & Matt are up to check us out at webeparents.com, or follow us on our socials at Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube. Be sure to subscribe to webe Pärents wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Alona Pulde:

Hey there, we'd love for you to hit that subscribe button. By subscribing, you're helping us spread the word and connect with more amazing people like you.

Producer:

Welcome to We Be Parents, where parent doctors Matthew Letterman and Alona Polday explore current parenting topics, share stories, and help bring families closer together.

Alona Pulde:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to We Be Parents, the podcast where we dive into the real-life joys and heartbreaks of parenting and help you grow stronger, closer, and more connected along the way. Hi, I'm Dr. Alana Polde. Hi,

Matthew Lederman:

I'm Dr. Matthew Letterman.

Alona Pulde:

And we are really excited to talk to a very special guest today. We'd like to welcome Dr. Steve Cole, someone whose research has reshaped how we understand the link between connection and health. He's a professor of medicine, psychiatry, and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and director of the Social Genomics Core Laboratory at the Norman Cousins Center. With over 200 scientific publications, his work explores how our social world, things like connection, purpose, loneliness, and love, gets transcribed into the language of our genes. His work has shown that when we feel emotionally unsafe or disconnected, our bodies respond at the cellular level and that this stress pattern called the CTRA, which we'll talk about more in the podcast, can be reversed through healing relationships, compassion, and finding meaning and purpose. And that message really hit home for us personally, not only in our own lives, but also in that of our 13-year-old daughter who has Crohn's disease. And over the past few years, we've seen how her symptoms often rise or fall with what's happening around her, how supported she feels, what her friendships are like, and how stable her environment feels. So we want to begin this podcast, not just as hosts, but also as parents wondering if we're helping a family like ours. Dr. Cole, first welcome and thank you for being here. Sure,

Dr. Steve Cole:

my pleasure. Good to join you. And

Alona Pulde:

Dr. Cole, for those of you who can't see him, is wearing spiffy glasses and he explained because his eyes are dilated and he still is here with us today. So we really appreciate that. So Dr. Pohl, if we were helping a family like ours, where would you start? What really matters most when it comes to healing through connection? And maybe you can begin that by kind of explaining CTRA.

Dr. Steve Cole:

Sure. So you can think of that as sort of what goes wrong in the world. Basically, the CTRA is you can think of it as like a molecular reflex. So we're familiar with reflexes in the nervous system where you don't even have to intend it. If you get a certain kind of stimulus, your body is programmed to produce a certain kind of muscular response. So these kinds of reflexes don't require us to decide to do it. You can think of them as like baked into the wiring of the human body. In a similar way, our brains are constantly evaluating our lives without us really realizing it at all. You can think of this as like the operating system on a computer constantly running in the background, basically saying, is the world a predictable, generally safe place that I understand? Or is it unpredictable? And your brain treats unpredictable and unstable as unsafe. And so... again, without us actually having to ask for this to happen, when we feel threatened or insecure for more than a short period of time, essentially our brain turns on fight or flight stress responses that travel throughout our bodies through the so-called sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system, which is basically just a network of nerves that comes out of your spine and coordinates the activity of every major organ system in your body, including, it turns out, your immune system. So the conserved transcriptional response to adversity is really a pattern of change in immune cell molecular biology that we bumped into when we were looking at people who were experiencing life as threatening or uncertain for an extended period of time. We started We actually bumped into this initially looking at chronic loneliness, which we often think of as a kind of sadness. But actually, it turns out that social connection to others is really the chief concern. safety signal for the human brain. And we can kind of get into this later about why that is. But to make a long story short, human beings are sort of intrinsically social. And when we're either disconnected from other human beings or we're not feeling safe in their presence, if we are marginalized or become an enemy of our tribe or something like that, those are all interpreted by this kind of automatic operating system brain process as a state of threat. And we don't have asked for that sends these biochemical signals from fight or flight stress responses. And one of the things it does is it shifts the pattern of gene expression in our white blood cells to essentially prepare us to deal with a wounding injury. What changes when we're feeling threatened, at least, you know, over most of our evolutionary history, was our likelihood of being injured. And so you can think of this as the immune system sort of adapting to to the greater risk of injury that has historically taken place when we don't have the safety of a stable, protective community. And what it does is it basically shifts its molecular resources away from dealing with the kinds of microbes that tend to cause us problems when we are in, you know, sort of socially connected, safe, secure spaces like viruses, which we are all reminded from the pandemic era, they really like sociality and that's how they get around. So actually it turns out our bodies by default are working to protect us against these socially mediated threats like viral infections. But during times of threat or uncertainty, it basically redeploys its resources away from that war and shifts them over to to the war against hemorrhage and the war against bacterial infections. In other words, the kinds of things that would threaten us if we experience a wounding injury. So you can think of this as the immune system learning to listen to the nervous system and make a kind of a forecast about what kinds of threats or microbes it's gonna run into. And to change that forecast, when we feel an acute sense of threat or unsafety. So that's the recipe about how this comes about.

Alona Pulde:

That's truly fascinating. And just to kind of touch on some of those points that really hit home for me is, it doesn't matter if I physically feel safe in an environment. If I emotionally am not feeling safe, a similar pattern is beginning to happen in my body to gear up and have a fight response to that.

Dr. Steve Cole:

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that actually... creates a lot of complication because it turns out our brains, you know, especially now that we have a very complex, you know, kind of symbolic and busy, you know, social and cultural worlds, our brains have lots and lots of hooks that can get us feeling threatened or insecure. Once upon a time, that was like, you know, a small number of things like, you know, a tiger raiding my camp or the raiding from the neighboring hunter-gatherer village or something like that. But now, everything we do in our workday is vaguely threatening. It's not as acutely threatening as the tiger was, but what's different is that instead of having these big spikes of stress or threat that actually our nervous systems are pretty good at handling, we have evolved a culture and a lifestyle where we're constantly exposed to a low-grade constant, you can think of it as like a constant drizzle of low-grade threat or uncertainty in our lives. And our bodies really were not engineered to deal with that. They were engineered to spend a small amount of time being threatened, and then a very large amount of time feeling secure and well and happy and generative and cared for, because that's what village life was really like. Most of the time you were not in conflict with either the tiger or your neighboring villagers. And so it was more sort of the exception than the rule when we had to run these stress systems. But now, the way we live, we run these things more or less all day, at least all of our waking hours every single day, Maybe weekends accepted, depending on how your family goes, though. I mean, maybe even weekends are stressful. So it's really this scope over time. It's the temporal scope of this program that's actually so destructive. And the reason is that most of the diseases that kill us don't happen in one minute. They get built over decades. And so these decades of leading a life of sort of, you know, quiet desperation, I guess, is a term they sometimes will use, or this constant low-grade threat and uncertainty. It's that that allows this kind of biological response to act like a fertilizer for the production of cancers and heart attacks and neurodegenerative diseases and autoimmune diseases of the sort that you described for your daughter.

Matthew Lederman:

My experience is that there'll be a lot of people that, clients that we work with, will say, I feel safe. But my experience has been they're not very good at assessing if their nervous system feels safe. Is that your experience as well?

Dr. Steve Cole:

Yeah. So this is actually one of the most interesting and vexing features is that, in fact, We often think about stress in a kind of a unitary concept, but in fact, the body has at least two different sort of stress systems in it. One of them is this kind of conscious, if you're into neurobiology, this is your cortex that is thinking and aware and paying attention to what's going on and forming a view of like, well, this is normal or this is not normal. But that's actually separate from this more non-conscious brainstem level threat detection and response system that we share with animals going all the way back to fish, basically. And that system is the one that's actually running the show in the fight or flight stress response. It's not our conscious experience that directly determines whether our body is operating as if it's threatened. It's really more this operating system level behind the scenes, non-conscious threat evaluation process that's controlling what's happening in our internal molecular worlds. And it's not the case that those two systems actually agree In fact, it's not uncommon at all to find people saying, I'm very, very stressed, but you ask their brainstem and their autonomic nervous system, and in fact, they look like they're doing okay. The reason they're very stressed is because that cortex level thinking, feeling system has been hassled a lot over the day, or it's very hypersensitive or, you know, sort of. you can think of it as like a sort of a trip wire. So there's like a lot of volatile emotional reactivity, but there's many times that that actually doesn't get computed by the brainstem as being a state of threat. And conversely, As you just said, it's not uncommon to find people leading lifestyles that are very, very threatening and volatile and unstable and insecure. And nonetheless, they've gotten used to them. So they don't think this is uncommon. They say everything is fine. There's no great problem. But the issue is your brainstem still has to make the math come out right. Your brainstem still has to... you know, get you to work. Even if you miss the bus, your brainstem still has to figure out some way to, you know, sort of get food and sleep, even though maybe you're not in a home or you're in a home where, you know, it's very emotional and unpredictable and you don't feel safe. So these are all things where your conscious brain can say, this is normal. And therefore, this is not a threat. But you still have to do a lot of work to survive in that normal. And that's when these kind of two impressions can separate themselves. And as you point out, you can have effectively a very threatening at the biological level reality, even when your psychological reality says everything is fine.

Alona Pulde:

Yeah, it almost becomes what becomes familiar becomes comfortable. But what becomes familiar isn't necessarily safe.

Dr. Steve Cole:

That is exactly right.

Alona Pulde:

We'll be right

Matthew Lederman:

back.

Alona Pulde:

And we didn't just lend our names, we helped build it and train it and brought in everything we've learned about emotional healing, connection and communication.

Matthew Lederman:

Yeah, we spent years training and learning and we've created Amari who is so calm and grounded, listens deeply and responds with warmth, clarity and compassion. There's no judgment, no reactivity. In fact, we tasked our children with trying to get Amari reactive and they still haven't succeeded. It's just steady support when you need it most.

Alona Pulde:

We use it ourselves all the time, especially when we feel stuck or overwhelmed. And Amari's really helped us pause, reflect, given us insight that helps us come back to each other.

Matthew Lederman:

We designed Amari to help you strengthen the relationships that matter most, starting with the one you have with yourself.

Alona Pulde:

And we are so excited that you can try it now at WeBeParents.com and click on WeBeConnecting with a K to sign up. And when you have your Amari moment, please let us know as we'd love to hear about it. Can you talk us through, because I think even sometimes when people will connect to this information, they don't connect the dots then to how that translates into actually bringing upon disease.

Dr. Steve Cole:

Yeah. So let's take a couple of examples. So part of the reason we as scientists spend so much time looking at cells and particularly the sort of the molecular processes flavoring of those cells, which genes are turned on, which genes are turned off, is because that is the primary You can think of it as like, I hate to use fancy terms, but this is in biology what we call plasticity. This is what allows a fixed body to grow in two different ways. In one way, it might take a stress wound in your coronary artery and build a really great little scab to take this tear and repair it and then make your coronary artery new again. Or, if you're in a body that has been more conditioned by this stress or threat or uncertainty, it turns out that's gonna produce more of a certain kind of immune cell called a monocyte And that monocyte is going to produce more inflammatory molecules. And so when you get a tear in that coronary artery, these monocytes are going to go in and they're going to basically make a bigger calcium scab over that torn artery. So that calcium scab, which is a good thing, that's your body trying to do wound repair on an injury in your artery. The problem is if that scab gets too big, it becomes what we call an atherosclerotic plaque. In other words, it's like a big lump in your coronary artery. Your coronary artery desperately needs blood supply because it's pumping hard all day long, every minute of your life. And so it needs this continuous supply of oxygen. When this atherosclerotic plaque, this calcium scab over, you know, sort of like a stress-based tear. When that gets too big, the coronary artery can't get enough red blood cells in there to supply it the oxygen it so desperately needs to keep your heart pumping, and eventually it starts to asphyxiate. It literally, you know, a heart attack is basically heart muscle not getting enough oxygen and dying in the process. So that's one example of where, like, stress biology by Tweaking what the immune system does to make it more inflammatory ends up having a consequence for the production of a certain disease. And these calcium scabs take decades to get built. Like we now know they start getting built early in life, almost like when you're a teenager, basically. But they don't become big enough to cause a heart attack until you're typically in late middle age or sort of your 60s, something like that. So it's often sort of long after the experiences that kick off this threat biology that we actually, if you will, pay the price in terms of disease. And for every other major chronic disease, I could tell you a story like the one I just told you. I could tell you a story about how these monocytes end up accidentally helping cancer grow and spread in your body. They don't cause cancer in the first place. The cancer gets caused a different way. But when these monocytes come in, they end up accidentally helping the cancer cells grow and escape to distant tissue into In other words, to metastasize. Same thing in your lung. You could take a person who's comfortable and relaxed, throw, let's say, a COVID infection at them, and as long as their immune system is responding effectively, everything is fine. But if you throw the same infection at them and their antiviral immune response is down for the count, and so the virus spreads more through your lungs, and the inflammatory response is ramped up, when the immune system finally gets the memo that there's virus everywhere, it's going to explode in its response. And that's what creates COVID. That's what creates this, you know, this essentially swelling in your lungs, this sort of inflammation where, you know, fluid gets into your lung and immune cells get there. And then your lung is no longer able to move oxygen from the air outside your body into the red blood cells that you need to survive. So for every major disease, there's a story like this about how that stress biology amplifies it.

Matthew Lederman:

So does that mean that people, for example, when they had COVID, they would say if you're older, you are at higher risk. If you are overweight, you are at higher risk. Does that mean those populations have these stress responses at baseline and that's why their risk is higher?

Dr. Steve Cole:

Sort of. It's not purely because of the stress, although that contributes. But what ends up those two factors being overweight and. and being older, both retune the immune system in the same way that the stress does. So you can think of them as independent processes that all have this effect of upregulating inflammation, and down-regulating your antiviral response. And if you take one of those things and add one of the others, you get two hits or three hits. And that's actually where you see a lot of this. It's not, again, the case that stress biology by itself is acting totally in isolation to create disease. What tends to happen is you get a certain insult from the microbial world, and then you've got an insult from the social or the psychological world that may I imagine it's almost like you're geared up

Alona Pulde:

for war. And in that attack state, you will misread even friendly interactions as threat. And so you're just attacking everything and you're attacking with hypervigilance.

Dr. Steve Cole:

That's exactly right. And you bring up an interesting point because that happens not just at the level of the immune system in its cells, but it also actually happens at the level of the brain. Once you are surrounded by threat or uncertainty all the time, you literally grow the brain in ways that make it make it more sensitive for detecting threats. And so that becomes a sort of a permanent part of your information processing system. So there's been these great studies done, for instance, in young kids who grow up in poverty or chaotic, violent neighborhoods. If you show them a video of just something ambiguous happening, like a teacher comes up and says, oh, hey, I need to see you after class. Can you drop by my desk or something like that? A kid that grows up in a comfortable, secure environment thinks like, oh, OK. is fine. You know, it's like, maybe, maybe they're going to tell me I did good on a test or, you know, something like that. Whereas a kid that grows up in a threatening, unstable, insecure environment thinks I'm in trouble. Something bad is going to happen. In other words, there's all kinds of vague, ambiguous things that happen to us in life where we have to some extent, some choice about how we interpret them. And these biases that are informed by our past history and reinforced by our biology are can end up literally remodeling our experience of everyday life in ways that make it more miserable or in ways that make it more optimistic and sustaining and healthy.

Alona Pulde:

I love that. I love that because I resonate with that a lot. If you're looking to give the benefit of the doubt, you're going to find that glass half full in most situations. But if you're looking that the world is trying to hurt you or manipulate you or whatever that is, then every interaction is going to come through that filter.

Matthew Lederman:

And also you're in no compassion for people who do see the world that way, that it's not that they just are choosing to. It's partially because their brain, has changed in a way that makes it easier or the path of least resistance is to see the negative or the threat or the problem. And I'm thinking that, hey, it's not that you're just making choices to see the world that way.

Dr. Steve Cole:

That's exactly right. You can think of this stuff as an adaptive response to a world that's full of objective real threats. And that creates this flywheel effect where you know, it's sort of like threat begets threat. Or as we discussed earlier, at some point, some people can just decide this is normal, where as other people might say, this is not normal. I need to get out of here. This is not a good environment. This is not a healthy place to be. So if you, to use your, you know, your optimism glass half full point, if you just feel like I can never escape from this, I'm just going to sit in this neighborhood where there's gunshots and gangs and, you know, stuff like that. even that level of optimism can end up creating a sort of a self-perpetuating cycle where you are now continually exposed to a more threatening, unstable, adverse environment that then reinforces this view that the world's an unsafe place and you need to be tough and you need to find social support, which is effectively what gangs are. They are families to replace families that can't do what children need them to do. And so these become part of this this, you can think of it as like this self-propagating cycle. And that's why the biology is, you know, most decisive. It's not because bad stuff happens in the world and you have a biological response by itself. It's that these biological responses sometimes feed back to change your behavior and your perceptions in ways that can create these kind of, you know, sort of downward spiral cycles or under better conditions, upward spiral cycles.

Matthew Lederman:

Once you realize you've you're sort of tuned because of childhood trauma, you know, the environment you're in, and you say, hey, I want to do this differently. How long does it take to retune the nervous system in your experience?

Dr. Steve Cole:

Surprisingly short period of time. We actually have, you know, unexpectedly good information about this. And this is actually one of the most important points of the kind of biology I'm talking about. So there is this sort of trauma-compassion relationship mindset especially coming out of the world of epigenetics which suggests that like bad stuff that happens to you early in life leaves some kind of permanent imprint on your biology which to some extent you can think of as like a curse like this bad thing that happened before curses the rest of my life it's changed my biology you know so on and so forth but what we see actually is that there is regardless of what you've been through a substantial capacity for a better tomorrow to change the biology that was put in place by a bad yesterday. And we see this in sort of, you can think of them as observational correlational studies, where for instance, the famous Romanian orphanage studies, like definitely these kids that grew up in orphanages were really messed up. They had all kinds of psychological problems, biological problems, stress biology running like crazy. What was amazing is that when they got adopted into stable middle-class families in London or something like that, how quickly their behavior and their academic outcomes and their psychological well-being and even their biological well-being, how actually successful it was just taking them out of an impoverished environment and putting them in a more kind of emotionally supportive environment. It's always challenging to work from these observations because we can't really control things in the way scientists are used to. But what we can do, for example, is take monkeys that are born into a little monkey society and randomize them to be raised either with the normal social, parental, typically maternally structured social context. Or we can put them in a little apartment with a bunch of other animals. infant monkeys, which sounds cute, but is really closer to the Lord of the Flies. It's like a lot of chaos, not a lot of stability, not a lot of predictability. They don't get hurt. There's just chaos all the time and very little structure. And we can see within just a few months exactly what I was talking about, the immune system remodeling itself to deal with a more stressful, chaotic, threatening environment. So we can do that. And then you could say, you know, run that regime for you know, all of adolescence. And then once they hit what in our, our years would be like 12 to 14 or something, you can take those monkeys and put them back into the stable social environment and then ask the question, do they stay, does their biology stay locked in on their unstable early social circumstances or does it accommodate the to this more healthy, socially well-structured environment that they've just put into? And the answer is about 95% of this stress-driven deviation in what their immune system is doing molecularly gets reversed often within just four to six months of being in a more stable social environment. So the take-home point is it is never too late to change the world and make a life better. Even if you get to adolescence, having been exposed consistently to threat or uncertainty, it's still not too late to change your psychology or behavior, and your biology is a consequence of that. Now, not everything goes away. Those animals that were in unstable worlds continue to be more twitchy. They tend to respond more strongly to negative events. Interestingly, they also tend to respond more strongly to positive events. So they're more variable. Even though their average level of activity sort of reverts back to the healthy mean, their reactivity, which is probably driven mostly by, brain level nervous system things continues to be a little bit twitchy over life, but that just underscores the importance of engineering a life that is stable and has more good days than bad days in preserving the health and wellbeing of those people or monkeys as the case may

Matthew Lederman:

be. This episode of We Be Parents is brought to you by We Be Calm. The ChildCalmer designed by doctors and loved by parents.

Alona Pulde:

Struggling with bedtime routines or managing your child's anxiety? WeBeCalm transforms deep breathing into a fun and engaging activity, helping kids find their inner calm. Perfect for bedtime stressful moments or anytime your child needs a little extra help to stay calm. Visit WeBeCalm.com to learn more and bring tranquility to your family. WeBeCalm. Because... we be in this together. What kind of messages might a child, a 13-year-old child, or any child's immune system be picking up from their environment? And beyond, like, egregious, you know, obvious, like, physical violence, verbal abuse, things like that. So,

Dr. Steve Cole:

kind of the key message nuclear psychology of all of this is a sense of trust or safety so there's lots of ways that those experiences can be challenged or undermined but what it comes down to in any given case like if you're talking about you know your your daughter and her autoimmune disease you know the real question is for this person do they feel a sense of trust and safety in their environment in general, on most days, in most circumstances. If they don't, and this is challenging because, you know, as parents or as, you know, sort of teachers, we can do our best to create trust-inspiring circumstances. But, you know, the trust really comes from within a person. And so we can't, literally rewrite other people's emotions. So this is actually a big challenge. But to make a long story short, if you can get somebody to the point where they're feeling generally trusting and generally safe, and safety is a tricky one because I don't mean to imply that people should go hide in the closet because it's actually, interestingly enough, it's not the safety of the individual that matters most to their biology. It's the safety of what they care about. And lots of times, what we care most about is us. But there are some times when the things we care about are actually self-transcendent. There are other things. And the prototypical example of this is like if there's a house on fire and your child is in it, most parents will run into that house, even though that is not good for their individual health and well-being. Because to them, what matters most is their child, not themselves. They will endure amazing amounts of threat, pain, suffering, and uncertainty. And that is not, strictly speaking, accounted for by these self-preservation theories of stress or threat. It's accounted for by these value preservation theories that we have things we care about. And most of the time that is us, but sometimes it's stuff that we care about even more than ourselves or are part of ourselves. So that's one example of how... And that... valuation, aspiration, care, pro-social biology. We actually understand that pretty well. We understand how it works in the brain. We understand the good it does for raising children and, you know, finding food and mates and making the world a better place, creating things, everything from, you know, building houses to art to climbing mountains that sense of hope and seeking and wanting to make the world a better place is actually one of the the major secret sauce ingredients of all animals but especially of humans so That kind of psychobiology is actually one of the most effective ways at pushing back against this threat or uncertainty biology. In other words, it sounds strange, but often the most therapeutic thing you can do for a person who's suffering is to give them a chance to help somebody else. This is why 12-step programs work as well as they do, is because you can do a lot to cure a person by giving them a job helping somebody else you know, sort of overcome the same kind of challenges that they're experiencing. So strangely enough, even for children, like, you know, children learn very early the power of collaboration, cooperation, pro-social stuff. And they actually are in many cases, you know, even more in touch with their basic empathic instincts than adults are. Why? Because they don't have to pay the rent. Their world is much more governed by, believe it or not, by emotional exchange because they're not locked into these more pragmatic, you know, sort of yokes of just, you know, sort of continuing economic existence. So there's lots of ways to kind of push back against the stress biology, in addition to actually just reducing stress biology, like in a psychotherapeutic sense. There's all kinds of clever strategies that

Alona Pulde:

happen. Before we get into strategies, I just, so there are two things that I was curious about. One is, you mentioned not only feeling safe yourself, but the things that you care about feel safe so I imagine you know for our children it's friendships that you know that are important to them socially but also for their intrinsic value and internal self-worth and family relationships and things like that in this culture now I don't know I don't know if this is true I'm kind of just you know speaking on the fly here but um I imagine that when you lived in a village and everything was in person, even conflict resolution was a little bit easier than what we have now, you know, cancel culture, ghosting, or so much of it living in a virtual world.

Dr. Steve Cole:

That you have no control

Alona Pulde:

over. Right, that you have no control over.

Dr. Steve Cole:

Even worse, it becomes your permanent record, right? So you can get thousands of people bullying you now when you step over the line instead of one or two people. And, you know, it's there forever. Like it's on a clip somewhere, right? So yeah, you're absolutely right. The kind of the social feedback systems and networks that we sort of evolved to inhabit, the digital world has changed those things in significant ways, both in terms of the number of connections we have, the durability of those connections, and also the ability to abstract a moment and turn it into an event As opposed to like, I know this person and they said this thing, but that's not really who they are or what they're like. There used to be a more, you can think of it as a reputation enriched sense of who people were in a village because you had spent all of this time with them. Whereas now you can just excise a tiny little snippet of behavior without any context. circulated around and turn it into something that is what everybody likes on the Internet, which is a provocation to get really mad or to get really enthusiastically supportive. And all of the algorithms that social media works on are based upon finding these extremes of emotional activation, either positive or negative, especially negative, because that actually is asymmetrically more powerful in terms of memeing and sort of garnering transmission and likes and stuff like that. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. It's gotten to be more fraught. And we see that in, you know, I think you guys are probably familiar with analyses of this by people like Jonathan Haidt, who talks a lot about how the, you know, sort of the social media world has changed individual senses of security, particularly in adolescents and especially in adolescent females. in ways that are just completely unprecedented in human history. And they leave people feeling, you can think of them as constitutionally threatened or uncertain. They're very disinclined to present their real selves. They're very disinclined to take chances. They sort of don't feel a great deal of personal agency or capacity to achieve the things they want to achieve. So they're often trying to essentially create social gangs to do what they want to do, or to affiliate with powerful external forces that they hope that their community membership will protect them from, you know, this kind of individually targeted abuse, not, not unlike, you know, gang psychology and the classic, you know, sort of male sense either. So, uh, it is, it is, uh, You're absolutely right. I mean, it is definitely a new world there, one that is not very well aligned with the primary sources of safety and well-being that used to you know regulate our physiology as you know predominantly safe and stable with occasional threats now you know the social media world and um you know as you watch other people crucified over and over and over again it's hard not to worry that you might accidentally be the next one in line and so that does create this constant sense of eggshells and to prevent yourself from suffering reputational damage. You hide yourself and that promotes disconnection, a sense of alienation and atomization and mistrust. So remember, the key to running a healthy body is having a sense of trust and security. This is the antithesis of trust, right? This is like a whole world that is wired to find some tiny transgression and turn you into some villain to be burnt at the stake.

Alona Pulde:

Yeah. And and, you know, you said that that was very relevant, too, is that at one point the community knew you and there was something to be said about reputation in the community. So even if gossip was circulating, it went through a little bit more of a discretionary process, whereas now. there is no, especially with kids, that there's no impulse control. You know, anything that comes to mind is out of their mouth, is on these texts that are going to thousands and thousands of people and then getting shared. It can really wreak havoc in a system. And

Matthew Lederman:

like we found with our daughter once that, you know, went into school and like all of a sudden the friend group wasn't talking to her, wasn't explaining why. And then for days, didn't talk to her. So she just read her book. But then a couple of days later, it was like somebody said something about something that they believed. And then, you know, so it was like going in with that level of unpredictability where today they're talking to me. I don't know if tomorrow what's going to happen. They're not going to explain why. I just imagine how unstable that feels, especially when kids in general, in part what we do with Weeby Parents is trying to give parents' skills to help children communicate differently and communicate with your children differently. But this silent treatment, this withdrawal of love and attachment, to me, I imagine is one of the major stimulants of this type of stress response. Can you sort of highlight some of the big ones that are most impactful as far as how the body perceives threat?

Dr. Steve Cole:

Sure. And you actually just bumped into the one that we bumped into first, which was, you know, sort of loneliness. So loneliness, I think we all think about loneliness in the sort of acute transient sense. But the kind of loneliness that actually shows up in the epidemiology as toxic for health is when a person is lonely. you know, sort of month after month for years at a time. And most of us are not like that. You know, if we lose a relationship or move to a new place, we are lonely. But, you know, we tend to repair that social hunger. We develop new relationships. There's some people, though, that don't do that. And that usually stems from some sense of mistrust, this idea that I'm not going to take risks to meet new people because I know the social world is, you know, sort of an unreliable, unsafe, threatening opportunity place that will take advantage of me. And so people who are chronically lonely show exactly this kind of threat-related activation in their immune system that we talked about earlier. And that was actually kind of a surprise because most people don't take loneliness that seriously. At least they didn't a decade or two ago. Now the memo is out and people realize actually this is something of a crisis at this point. But at the time we began this work, it was... It was almost a bizarre idea that this social experience would somehow have any kind of, you know, sort of cast any sort of shadow into what the molecular biology of our white blood cells were doing. I mean, that just seemed too far apart. Once you hear the logic I just sketched, it becomes more comprehensible. So, loneliness and social isolation are probably the most... ubiquitous of the molecular toxins that we run into. In other words, the most ubiquitous social processes that kick off these molecular reflexes that end up precipitating disease.

Matthew Lederman:

When you say loneliness, I want to also see if you agree with this, that you can have lots of friends and still be very lonely.

Dr. Steve Cole:

Totally true, yeah. The prototypical example is you can be Lonely in a room full of people, you know, people in Grand Central Station are probably lonelier than any other humans on Earth because they almost never know anybody amidst all of these people. And they don't know, you know, like, are these, would these people treat me fairly? Will they take care of me if I need help? You know, so on and so forth.

Alona Pulde:

I think that's the thing that you mentioned earlier. It's not just about who you know, it's also about trust. Like really trusting those people you know to show up for you. And again, in the viral, you know, world that we, the digital world that we live in, we may have a lot of friends or followers, but none of them are somebody you call in an emergency.

Matthew Lederman:

That's right. Or we talk a lot about how what's worse than being lonely and single is being lonely and married.

Dr. Steve Cole:

Yeah, that's exactly right. It really, you know, is just, spot on. It's especially volatile for kids, especially for adolescents, because they don't really have these either sort of like a long history of navigating this more volatile social world. They're used to being, in most cases at least, in some kind of well-structured family environment where these issues are not at stake. I mean, ideally, in a healthy family, trust at least exists within the nuclear family. And when trust doesn't exist there, then it actually can be quite devastating. And this is where we see, you guys have undoubtedly probably talked about attachment in the Bowlby sense. That is a very powerful effect. If an infant does not come to believe that she or he can count on adults to give them food and emotional comfort and care and warmth and stuff like that, that will grow a very different worldview and a very different nervous system. And that becomes an imprint that is, you know, a substantial, you know, it's just a big risk factor for interpreting or creating the rest of your life in a very different way than you would if you started from a secure base. So that absolutely true. Again, all comes back to trust and your generic sense of trust. Is the social world a safe place? Is my familial social world a safe place? Is the most important one? Then under ideal circumstances, the answer to that is yes. And then you start, you know, sort of evolving out of that as an adolescent. Obviously, this happens all the time, but it really ramps up during adolescence when kids start to leave the family and start to derive more of their identity and their sense of self and well-being from their peers and the world around them.

Matthew Lederman:

Before we wrap up this first part, if you're, for the parents that are listening, if their child was diagnosed with, you know, that we're dealing with Crohn's or cancer or some other, what would you say are some of the key things you would recommend sort of checking out or considering doing differently. I imagine how we show up as parents, how regulated I am is important, but I'm just curious if you were gonna say, Make sure, you know, these are the top three things to really look into.

Alona Pulde:

And if you can include, because I, you know, just kind of noting that is, you know, a breach of trust is a big one, but parents who are, you know, and we find ourselves doing that too, living in survival mode, having a really rough day, feeling totally burnt out, and then having to find, you know, tap into our reserve to show up for our children. And what is the impact of that? And so how do... How do parents support their children? And then in the next episode, we'll get to how parents can support themselves in each other, but.

Matthew Lederman:

Right, or even how they see when we're on reserve, I'm interacting with Alona differently, which then affects their nervous system, how they see us interact. So anyway, yeah, I would love to hear you speak on all this.

Dr. Steve Cole:

I mean, a lot of what happens in children's development, especially in their development of coping and navigation resources, is actually not what you say, it's what you do and how you act. And a lot of times... you know, people, I think, especially it's easy as, as parents, we all get overwhelmed. Um, there's probably the single most important thing that, that I've seen in terms of low hanging fruit is to just slow down and take a moment. Uh, and you don't have to have the answer, uh, but even just being able to slow down and take the moment to just, you know, sort of like, okay, we're stressed here. This isn't the way we want to be. Well, you know, I don't like this. What should we do? Tell me what's going on. So this process, this I think comes back to this generic parenting advice where people are so stressed about doing exactly the right thing as parents, whereas what we know from the research is just being there is like 95% of the story. And most people feel like, well, you know, being there is just the beginning. I need to do this right or that right or whatever. But when we look at the whole kind of variation in human experience, most of the positive impact comes from literally just being there every day in some kind of reliable, you know, sort of clockwork sense. It doesn't have to be perfect all the time. And in fact, in some sense, it's educational for it not to be perfect all the time. You know, being able to know that I'm going to be okay, even though people People are tired or unhappy or even overtly fighting. I mean, obviously you don't want to be beating each other, but at the same time to be able to learn that just because people are irritated or exhausted doesn't mean they're going to abandon you and your life is over. So that kind of, you can think of it as like almost self-compassion based, you know, sort of reducing the stress of parenting, I think makes a big difference in part because kids learn from their parents how to do that for themselves in their own relationships. A second thing is, that I think is very powerful. I mean, when we suffer, we tend to become self-focused. The basic sort of kind of emotional reflex we have is when we have pain, we look at the part that's in pain. But one of the most counterintuitive findings, as I described earlier, is that actually some of the most resilience-promoting, healing stuff psychologically and biologically actually involves not looking at ourselves, but by looking outside ourselves at the things that we care about. and redirecting our attention towards other people that we care about, other sort of goals, virtuous outcomes that we want to create in the world, be they communities or discoveries or creations. Being able to go back to the mode of being a participant in the bigger sort of human civilization and not get so preoccupied with your own self-stress and suffering is actually a tremendous opportunity and one that we don't magically gravitate to. It takes a certain amount of social checking and work sometimes to do that.

Matthew Lederman:

So slowing down, being present, and contributing to the sort of greater community.

Dr. Steve Cole:

Yeah. And that doesn't have to be dramatic. I mean, you can contribute to the greater community by clicking back to attending to your family members, by attending to the customers at your business, by attending to, you know, colleagues who are trying to climb a mountain, by, you know, sort of doing like anything that we would think of as generative has this potential to move us out of this self-focused, you that can often breed negative emotions and kind of fill our consciousness with pain and suffering and get us back to the good things in life, the things we care about. That often is surprisingly healing on the stress biology side to reconnect with the stuff that's outside us and good as opposed to inside us and bad.

Matthew Lederman:

Wonderful. We're going to pause here and then we want to ask everybody to tune in next week for the second half. We really appreciate it. this Dr. Cole, this is so fascinating. It's so important for people to fully heal. There's a lot of other things that don't respond to just medication or to exercise, to diet, to lifestyle. And I think this is a huge missing piece from the healing perspective, but also in the joy and really leaving this world, looking back and saying, I had a wonderful life. I think how you show up in this way could really impact. And I'd love next week to talk about, I know you talk about hedonic versus eudaimonic joy or pleasure. So lots to talk about and thank you again.

Alona Pulde:

Yes, thank you so much. My brain is churning. All the things that we can do differently in our own family, just based on this conversation and for ourselves, but also for our daughter. So thank you.

Dr. Steve Cole:

Sure, it's my pleasure. It's been great to talk with you guys and absolutely delight.

Alona Pulde:

Your experiences and feedback are invaluable to us.

Matthew Lederman:

Please email us at parents at webetogether.com with your own cheers and tears as well as any questions or stories you'd like to share. And

Alona Pulde:

we'd love for you to hit that subscribe button. Bye for now.