Episode 145 — TECH Is The Great DYSREGULATOR
Guest: Peter Sullivan • Date: March 30, 2023
Episode Overview
Peter Sullivan returns to the show to share a myriad of ways you can get regulated! That’s harder to do given the increasing amount of stressors, distractions, and chaos we all deal with every day. The best move you can make is to focus on the biggest threat.
About Peter Sullivan
Peter Sullivan is the founder and CEO of Clear Light Ventures, Inc., as well as an environmental health funder who focuses on toxins and wireless safety. He has spent the last 17 years focusing on environmental health. Peter’s work on detoxification and EMF (electromagnetic fields) has been featured in the book Toxin Toxout, Mother Jones magazine, Paleo Magazine, and CNN’s Morgan Spurlock: Inside Man. He is an executive producer of the documentary “Generation Zapped”, about the health effects of wireless, and co-executive producer of the film “The Devil We Know” about Teflon pollution. Peter serves as a board advisor to Pure Earth (pollution.org), and the International Institute for Building-Biology & Ecology. Previously, he worked as a software designer, making software easier to use at Netflix, Inc., Interwoven, Inc., Excite@Home, and Silicon Graphics. He also served as an Executive Officer and pilot in the United States Navy. He has a B.A. in psychology from the University of Detroit and an M.S. in computer science from Stanford University.
You’ll Discover
The Root Cause of So Many Issues (6:04)
Why It’s More Than a Problem, It’s An Addiction (12:26)
The Surprising Thing EVERYTHING Relates To (16:01)
Things To Do When You’re Ramped Up (18:21)
The Greatest Regulators (28:37)
The Issue With Odors and Lights (31:21)
Arguably The Most Toxic Dysregulator (34:49)
What You Want To Measure Inside Your Home (36:31)
Referenced In This Episode
Autism Parenting Secrets Episode 26 The Body Is Electric And Dirty Electricity Harms
Autism Parenting Secrets Episode 57 Dirty Electricity DEMANDS Attention
Stink movie
Full Transcript
Peter Sullivan 0:00
So we're seeing more and more, we're seeing not only, you know, kids with sensory issues and autism becoming emotionally dysregulated, having their nervous systems not even be able to form correctly, but it's now, it's you're seeing adults with this, you're seeing adults stimming like kids with autism, you're seeing adults with the jittering and the so and so and the phone addiction, and they can't, so it's really, it's actually embarrassing, and I look at this, I'm just like, "Wow, this is just a disaster.
Cass Arcuri 0:24
Want to truly be the best parent you can be, and help your child thrive after their autism diagnosis? This podcast is for all in parents like you, who know more is possible for your child.
Len Arcuri 0:35
With each episode, we reveal a secret that empowers you to be the parent your child needs now saving you time, energy, and money, and helping you focus on what truly matters most. Your child.
Cass Arcuri 0:47
I'm Cass,
Len Arcuri 0:47
and I'm Len.
Cass Arcuri 0:48
Welcome to Autism Parenting Secrets.
Len Arcuri 1:02
Hello, and welcome to Autism Parenting Secrets. Returning to the show is Peter Sullivan. He is the founder and CEO of Clearlight Ventures Incorporated. For nearly two decades, he's been a change agent to improve environmental health, and in addition to promoting awareness, he's an environmental health funder who focuses on toxins and wireless safety. Peter's work on detoxification and electromagnetic fields has been featured in the book Toxin, Toxout, Mother Jones Magazine, Paleo Magazine, and CNN's Morgan Spurlock Inside Man. He's an executive producer of the documentary Generation Zapped about the health effects of wireless, and the co-executive producer of the film The Devil We Know about Teflon pollution. Peter serves as a board advisor to Pure Earth and the International Institute for Building Biology and Ecology, and previously he worked as a software designer making software easier to use at Netflix, Interwoven, Excite at Home, and Silicon Graphics. He also served as an executive officer and pilot in the United States Navy. He's got a BA in psychology from the University of Detroit and an MS in computer science from Stanford University. So today we're going to focus on how technology contributes to dysregulation and what you can do about it. The secret this week is tech is the great dysregulator. Welcome, Peter.
Peter Sullivan 2:33
Thank you, Len. It's good to see both of you. I started this journey getting addicted to tech and switching from being a Navy pilot to the computer world, which was a, you know, seemed a little bit nutty in the 80s during the Top Gun era, but it turned out okay. It turned out okay financially, I will say, but I think the lesson that I had, I learned at Silicon Valley way before other people being a little bit more sensitive than other people, is that I got addicted to technology, and I loved it, and I was inspired by it, and all the things you could do with it in Silicon Valley, but it also was really, you know, hard on my body, and, and hard on sleep, everything, and when my kids, one of my first child had some sensory issues, you know, I got the Carol Karanowitz book, The Out of Sync Child, well, you know, I'm thinking like an engineer and a design, like, well, if something's out of sync, how do we get it back in sync, or what's what's desynchronizing it? So, and that's been a 20, yeah, it's been a long journey, and it's been actually a really fruitful journey, really interesting journey. So, the lesson I had to learn the hard way was that, yeah, the thing that I love and brought into the house. You want to blame it on somebody else, but the things that I loved and brought into the house are the things that dysregulated my kids and myself even more than my wife. Usually, the usually the women are the most are more sensitive. In my case, I was more sensitive to the tech, but yeah, you'll frequently have a situation where it's usually the opposite, where the woman is the most sensitive to the tech and complains about, and the guy just is dismissive and doesn't, you know, that's the pattern. And then I've seen several times where then the wife becomes electrosensitive, so it becomes really sensitive to it, says, turn it off, so and so, and then, and the husband doesn't want to do it, and so forth, but then two cases where, then the husband got cancer and died. So, the question is, do you want to know what's impacting you, or do you not want to know? Do you want your nervous system to tell you what's going on and get feedback about what's harming you, or do you want to just go down when it's a little bit too late? And so that's a little extreme case, but that's happening, you know, and my ex-wife in California had just went through stomach cancer, so this stuff can be pretty.. it's just pretty intense, and so we're seeing more and more, we're seeing not only, you know, kids with sensory issues and autism becoming emotionally dysregulated, having their nervous systems. Not even be able to form correctly, but it's now, it's you're seeing adults with this, you're seeing adults stimming like kids with autism, you're seeing adults with the jittering and the so and so and the phone addiction, and they can't, so it's really, it's actually embarrassing, and I look at this, I'm just like, wow, this is just a disaster, and you know, and I know a lot of the people that did love tech originally, Tony Fedela did the iPhone, has been in my house, held my kids, you know, one of the other cell phone designers from Stanford is a friend, and I, we, none of us intended to do this, right? So we all thought we were really here to empower people, and my resume said I want to empower people with personal technology. Well, you know, we, we kind of did the opposite, we did. We certainly did some good, but we have a lot of things to clean up, and so you know, and so we're talking about dysregulation now.
Peter Sullivan 5:49
And I think that's that's basically been kind of like the adult version, the adult psychiatric label for kids freaking out, kids having meltdowns, kids like on the autism spectrum or sensory spectrum having like a meltdown, so it's happening so frequently, so we learned, you know, we started doing all the sensory stuff to kind of try to regulate kids, but we weren't really getting rid of the root cause, so we were adding, you know, swinging and blankets and all these kind of sensory and movement therapies, and and all these things, but we were working hard against kind of the root cause of the issue, you know, one of your key premises is that you've got, as a parent, you know, focus on yourself, and you have to be regulated, and I didn't understand this until later, when I started learning more about how these things all work, but your, your heart rate, your brain waves, your nervous system sets the tone for your children, especially the mom. A lot of the kids look to the mom to see if the mom feels safe. Then that's a model for safety, right? So, if you're a mom, you have to actually, if you want your kids to not break out, you actually have to feel safe yourself and take the time to do that. And a lot of things, lot of times, the thing that's making you not feel safe is right in your pocket, or sometimes even on your wrist, if it's an Apple Watch, or whatever. And I think we even had a belief system, like autism was something that was bad that happened in the past, but it's not happening now. We're, you know, where Martha Herbert is saying, no, it's really more of a state of overload, and it's happening right now, and if you unload kids, they will get, they will calm down and get better, and so, and that's what we're finding. We're finding when you start turning off things, especially at night, and we've talked about this on your show before. If you get the sleep environment dialed in, you turn off, you know, if you don't have a cell phone or a baby, you don't have a baby monitor, or a cell phone, or an Apple Watch on the kid, no big wireless emitters in the room, then the kids can sleep better, and it doesn't disrupt their melatonin, and sleep is, you know, obviously when their brains are developing, but it's also when we kind of get rid of trauma, we're moving our eyes and REM sleep left and right, like EMDR therapy with low hormones, so it's it's desensitizing us to things that are scaring us, so we got so when we don't sleep well, because we've got, you know, Wi-Fi on, or a cordless phone on through the whole house, which is like leaving a light on at night and disrupting your melatonin, your REM sleep. Then you're getting rid of this free therapy that nature was doing for us, which was free trauma therapy. And then there's so many factors they build on each other, we understand now mostly the mechanisms going on with wireless, and there's a new study that just came out on g, like they didn't even have any, so they released the whole product without any testing at all, and the new study comes out and it's saying that g is impacting the middle of the head, so the pituitary, the HP, what it's called, the HP adrenal axis, so it's like basically the the center of your head that's related to like endocrine regulation, so so the pineal gland, which is light sensitive, and you could consider wireless to be light at a frequency below what you can see that's still going on, so you're dysregulating the pituitary, the pineal gland, the pituitary is going to get dysregulated, and those are the master glands, so your home, your hormones are off, your brain waves are off, you're not detoxing fully at night, your heart rate's elevating because you're in fight or flight mode, so do you have them as the same level of emotional capacity that you had before?
Peter Sullivan 9:17
No, and if you're in those states, if you're in fight or flight mode, you're not threats are the priority, so learning and repairing and detoxing and social interaction and bonding are not a priority, and so this is just saying this just not only in kids but in adults. So, are people as friendly and warm as they used to be? No, you know, unfortunately things have really fallen off, and we've really broken things at a deep level. So, the good news is that we kind of know how to - we kind of know what's going on, and you know, this is certainly not the only dysregulator. There, we've talked about wireless, but there are - there's electrical noise in the wireless, in the, in the wiring itself, called dirty electricity. You guys have interviewed Sam Milham about that, and that
Len Arcuri 10:03
we've actually done three, thanks to you originally raising it in our last discussion, which, by the way, for those listening, episode 22 is our conversation with Peter, where he does a phenomenal job of just really presenting a very easy to follow case for why EMFs truly matter in all the forms, and in that discussion, Peter, you mentioned dirty electricity, which even then was kind of still somewhat new to me, and since then we've done three episodes on dirty electricity, and I'll include that in the show notes, but yeah, but that obviously is something that's a big problem, which very few people are aware of,
Peter Sullivan 10:36
yeah, and Sam, Sam Milham, back in 2010 or 12, I can't remember, even before was doing a pilot study on neurotransmitters and dirty electricity, and I gave him a little bit of money for that, and he basically found that it was disrupting neurotransmitters. Do you want your neurotransmitters disrupted? You know, no,
Cass Arcuri 10:54
Peter. So, for the listeners who haven't listened to the previous conversation, absolutely do that, but I'm thinking about from a parent's perspective, and what you had said, you know, this dysregulation - if the parent is dysregulated, the child is going to be dysregulated. And so this is really important for the parents, especially the moms, is what can you do to help get reregulated? So you know, when you sleep, put your phone in airplane mode, as much as you can, maybe spend time in nature without your phone on, and the less scrolling, because all of these things kind of dysregulate you, and if you want to show up your best self for your child, you need to be grounded, you need to be regulated, and so this is where you know there's so many little things parents can do to kind of help with this, knowing that we know technology's here to stay, but it's like, how maybe you know, is it the timeframe that you use it, or when do you use it? Have a little bit of structure around that, because you know, let's be honest, a child just gets your child just gets an autism diagnosis, you're going to be researching stuff any minute you have, so you're going to be using your phone a lot, but there are things that you need to do to make sure that you're as regulated as you can be for your child, and then also minimizing personally minimizing screens for our kids, because you're taking a dysregulated kid and dysregulating them even more, which you're just adding fuel to that fire,
Peter Sullivan 12:24
right? And you're not only dysregulated, then you're kind of creating addiction. And Victoria Dunkley is a psychiatrist in LA who's done a ton of work on screen time, and I think she had a book in like 2007 or eight about how to reset your child's brain, and she and I have spoken at conferences together, so she'll talk about screen time, and I'll talk about wireless, and you know, my experience, though, is everyone just focused on screen time and blue light, but as I said, like the wireless is kind of more of an issue, like we've had TVs, you know, we've had some of these things before, we've had blue light at night, people didn't constantly freak out, so yeah, so Victoria's program is fantastic, and I'm just trying to think of what other else, but there's, there's so much more that piles on. There's a lot of work here with the autonomic nervous system that we have to focus on in trauma, so you can almost think of this whole thing as being there's there's an addiction element, there's a trauma element, and then there's just being in the right gear. So I think more and more I've learned about the autonomic nervous system, and there's, you know, and if you're in, again, if you're in fight or flight mode, you're not in social mode, you're not in engaging mode, but so how do you shift gears, and I like to think of the autonomic nervous system, I think your body is well, not only is it a battery, is it not only is it electric and a battery, and that charge level is important, but it's a, it's like a stringed instrument, it's like a musical instrument. It can be high strung, it can be low strung, or it could be like a car or a bike that needs to be in the right gear for the right level of activity. And when you are in, like, the in a heightened activity, like right before this talk, or before performance, you're going to get a little bit amped up, and that's your body getting you into that state, little more arousal, where it increases the energy, and it'll increase your precision level, so that it says, don't make a mistake, have enough energy, you know, this is an important time period. The problem is, we can't be in that state all the time, it's exhausting, right? It's not a sustainable state. It's like highlighting every line in a book when you're going through it. It should just be like here and there, exactly. She knows you've seen those people do that, right? Yeah, exactly. And that's what everything's important. It's like, no, everything's not important. So, you need to learn to dial it down, and we're having.. we are struggling getting our nervous system to dial it down. Now, a lot of people are doing dysfunctional stuff to dial it down. A lot of people are drinking to dial it down, you know. Even me, I would do a little kombucha emotional eating, like we're going, we're going for the carbs and all these things. So, what are the struck.. what are the ways that I dial my nervous system down now that are more constructively than, you know, drinking? Alcohol, or I even dialed out to kombucha, but I can't even do that anymore. So, or chocolate, I gotta get the chocolate's killing me. I find out my favorite chocolate lilies that has stevia has heavy metals in it now, and I'm just like
Cass Arcuri 15:16
chocolate for me. I was like, what do you mean it has lead like stuff?
Peter Sullivan 15:19
You can't like this, is it like I got, I'm clean living here, but I got to have something. So, the question is, what are we doing to dial it down? So, we've done, I think, with kids, Epsom salt baths have been one. So, Epsom salt baths transdermally absorbing, absorbing the magnesium and the sulfur. The magnesium feel helpful, the sulfur really helpful. So, the magnesium is a calcium channel calming calcium channel regulator. The other thing to watch out for, too, is just watch out for the glutamates. So, the glutamate, so to me the ultimate thing for autism, and actually I would say adult dysregulation is too much intracellular calcium. So, the cell membranes have these calcium channels that allow calcium to get inside the cells. There's not supposed to be very much in there, and when the calcium gets in there, it's that's the signal to excite. It's this performance mode we talked about. It's something important is happening. It could be important, good, could be important, scary. So the wireless signals and the dirt electricity are letting in too much calcium, but also from these NDMA receptors you can have chemical exposures like glyphosate and glutamate. So, a lot of people on the autism spectrum are really having good success with glutamates, and so it used to be we'd say, oh, people fighting over the cause of autism. It's like, when you look at this, it's like, well, this is all one thing. If you know, if you think of it from this perspective, is too much intracellular, the glutamate and the glyphosate, that makes sense, the wireless makes sense. There was even a doctor at Autism One talking about the endoplasmic reticulum, which is, which absorbs intracellular calcium, and when you drink coffee, it, it releases the calcium into the cell to kind of excite you again, so, so, if you're drinking coffee and caffeine, that's another thing, like, dial that down, because you've your capacity to do that now, you're already going to be amped up from all the wireless, you don't need that.
Cass Arcuri 17:14
Yeah, Peter, what you were saying too, with the glyphosate and the glutamate, I mean, part of that too is processed food, guys, has a lot, you know, so glyphosate, so high. We've already had Dr. Stephanie sent up on, but like things like corn, things like wheat, things like oats are high glyphosate items, also things like chickpeas, right? But then also the processed food are usually high glutamate foods, and there you have a lot of hidden ingredients, or some. I was recently helping parents, you know, look in their pantry, and their child, one of the foods they were eating was, you know, like a Lucky Charm cereal. So, in that, you have corn, so probably high glyphosate, right? And then you also have all these artificial colors, which also would be high glutamates, so when you're eating processed food, a lot of screen, you have this ability to really impact someone where they're almost these behaviors are not necessarily because of their autism, it can be what's surrounding them, right, the food that they're eating, as well as the electronics that they're using
Peter Sullivan 18:21
exactly, so when I get into a state where I'm over amped, and that can happen when I'm traveling, or just even from just whatever, I'm trying to get my heavy braking mechanisms that really help the most that I've learned through the years, and it's niacin flushing, niacin has been really helpful when people get over methylated, so that really dials down the methylation and keeps it from getting amped and also increases the blood flow and provides precursors to NAD, so you've got more energy, so flushing niacin always takes the edge off, L-theanine. I accidentally discovered how well L-theanine works for me, I was drinking a tea and I was like, "God, I'm so mellow, this is awesome, a kombucha, and I was looking at the ingredients, and then I was drink that all the time, and then I was had a lot of sugar and a little alcohol, so then I ended up just taking the L-theanine directly, or I have a tea called Spring Dragon that has a lot of L-theanine and adaptogens in it, which, which love, and I do that almost every day now. The other one that's really good for breaking is Martha Herbert told me about this, is that was the violite, which is a red light therapist, red light therapy that goes in your nose, but even on your head too. It's like a 40 hertz red light, which is the gamma brain waves. So the gamma brain waves are associated with the ash, the glial cells, and at night you know they're basically the glial cells that the support structure that are like the sponges that hold the toxins or the infrastructure, so when you engage the glial cells, that kind of tells your body it's slow down mode, slow down detox mode, and even just honestly warm infrared light or even. And you know, like the sauna lights and everything, those warm infrared lights are really calming, they kind of boosting up the mitochondria. Those are, I think, those are my best braking mechanisms. I've got some other ones too. I've got a some interesting.. there's, here's an interesting one for the autonomic nervous system. So people have done EMDR, like tapping, so tapping, or EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique, you say, feeling amped up, whatever, EMDR is the eye movement, left, right, and that's kind of like REM, REM, and it gets you out of freeze mode, and it lets you keep processing. Here's another one, I found this is US Biomagnets, is a doctor in New Jersey, has been promoting this protocol, and you know, like 20 bucks, 20 some bucks for a pair of magnets, or you want to get a couple more, you can just put it right on the vagal nerve, like, so the black goes on the right side and the red goes on the left side, and you put it on for 1520, minutes, depends on your latitude, you have to look it up in the book, but this is, it can be extremely calming, right, lot of movement therapies. I'm trying to think, what else I've got.
Len Arcuri 21:03
You've noticed the difference with the magnets, because I know you are someone who's more electro hypersensitive, right, which a decent percent of the population is. And to your point earlier, I mean, you may look at that as being some people may say, well, that's a lousy break, but it's actually a gift, right, because you can sense the stuff, whereas others can, but 100% of us are being harmed by stuff that doesn't work for our bodies, so for you it is the superpower, and with those magnets you're able to feel it,
Peter Sullivan 21:34
yeah, I can calm down pretty quickly with that, but and even with there's even some protocols for emotional regulation, so you get angry, you've got one, you put the black one facing your liver and the red facing your heart, for the again 1520 minutes, and I'm actually pretty.. it's pretty remarkable how much the emotions can move, because you know, again, the emotions can frequently be part of the dysregulation, so you're mad at your kid, your kid gets dysregulated, breaks your TV, and then you get mad at your kid, and now there's this cycle of whatever you're angry, you've got to, you're angry at the situation, you're angry about the fact that you've got to deal with this whole situation, you're angry at life, you're angry with, you know, whatever. So I've been really, that's been a great one, is the emotional regulation, and even just, you know, we've talked about just circadian rhythms, like getting out, and one of the big dysregulations is this light from the screens, and then almost like you're jet lagged, you just get thrown off, and so getting it, getting a lot of UV light in the morning. Andrew Huberman from Stanford talks a lot about this. It just sets off a whole, you get your rhythms in cycle, and when you're, if your circadian rhythms are off, you're pro-inflammatory, you're not going to sleep well, you're going to be moody, you're not, you're going to be like your jet lag, you're not going to have as much capacity. So, so that's been a big one. And again, if you've also got trauma, and I think almost everybody does, so you know, there's been so much work now on going back to your childhood wounds and trying to heal. To me, I had flight accidents in the Navy. I had a plane catch on fire, but I had a lot of car accidents. I had, you know, teachers yell at me, right, which to me was more traumatic than the, you know, plane on fire. You know, so, and a lot of good techniques for this now. So, you've got EMDR, I've got the whole, the body keeps the store about trauma, but so many good protocols, I think, for emotions. A frequent, you know, what else that I've been doing recently is frequency-specific microcurrent, which I've really liked. So it's an old-school protocol that's just two different frequencies. They use a lot of 40 hertz to get rid of inflammation, and they use another frequency to target it to like your spinal cord or your neck or whatever, and they have an emotional regulation thing too. So they had one. I was just doing it last night, and I wasn't honestly even using the frequency specific microcurrent. I was using two phones, I was using the Clear Tune app, which is like a cell an app for musical instrument tuning, generating 40 hertz, and then generating the other one was 970 hertz, is the emotional frequency, and then I was putting that, like, 940 hertz, and then directing that to, like, bladder or whatever for different emotions, and you know, and honestly, I got a great response from, not, you know, so that's almost free thing you could do, and the book on that is about bioresonance, and I will put that in the link. So, I am..
Cass Arcuri 24:24
that's amazing. You're using technology to kind of re-regulate.
Peter Sullivan 24:28
So, yeah, so I'm using.. so to me, when I get emotionally overloaded, I'm like, okay, I'm just thinking of myself as like a string, I'm like a musical instrument that's out of tune, and I'm trying to tune.. and this is old.. this is old school stuff. This is Chinese medicine, had different meridians stood for different things, like the liver was anger and the, you know, lung was grief, you know, these different things. And so, if you know what you're feeling, like I've been going through something, I was feeling sad, and like sadness is related to the small intestine meridian, which is a long he. Year, and so I've been using the magnets on the small intestine meridians, or Dr. Tennant's protocol for charging up, and you know, I've actually then be able to move through a lot of really intense emotions and trauma that I didn't really have the capacity to do before, that I was really stuck on, and just even just getting through some grief, and so, yeah, I think that's that's been a big one for people. I think we're all a little bit stuck in a lot of ways, and it's about freeing up our capacity, so that we can be there for ourselves and for our kids.
Cass Arcuri 25:35
And I think, you know, Peter, what I love, what you're saying, because it's also, let's, you know, take out some of the noise that's in the system, right? You know, as it relates to some of the technology that we don't even know, acknowledging past traumas and those kind of things, and it's just giving attention there can also be so much, so helpful. Another thing that we recently started working with a new naturopath, Len had his appointment yesterday, but I had mine last week, and she was using tuning forks on me, and like it was crazy, because she was like peeling back the layers, and my layer went back to, I think, being adopted, and like all sudden, my shoulders, for the first time in my whole life, when she did these tuning forks on me, were actually even. I've always been kind of like a winged, you know, and it was just amazing to see. Here's a tuning fork. No harm in this. She did it in a way that my body responded to, and I kind of got unstuck, which was pretty profound.
Peter Sullivan 26:34
Is that Elaine McCusick's work on human tuning, or whatever? Yeah,
Cass Arcuri 26:38
I don't know whose protocol she's following, but like,
Peter Sullivan 26:41
so I originally got.. I don't know how I found this, but I like.. I don't know.. 10.. well, I used to have ear ringing in my ears, and that was a tin.. it was an EMF thing, and somehow I remember reading this book.. I got a book called Human Tuning, and it was about using tuning forks.. and basically, this.. this guy.. he walked into the way.. he got into this.. he walked into a studio, audio studio, it was supposed to be completely silent, and he heard ringing, and the guy said, "No, it's completely silent there. What you're hearing is not ringing in the environment, it's you're hearing your nervous system. And a lot of our people now, we're nervous systems are so off that we're getting a lot of that ringing, and so I read that book, The Human Tuning Book, and then I got into Eileen, I think it's McCusy's book on tuning forks, and she's basically saying, like, you kind of, the left side, the right side of your body are different, like the sympathetic and parasympathetic, or the masculine and the feminine, and you've got to tune your body, and we get destabilized in one direction or other, and to the point where you know, I would get my neck would get off, and one of the, one of my great regulators and dysregulators was my atlas bone would get off, I would, my atlas bone would get off, I wouldn't sleep well, my hair, my ears would ring, whatever, I'd go into a nucleic doctor and he would adjust my atlas perfectly, and by 80% of people's, you know, atlases are off, and other backs, or their, and their hips are off too, exactly. So, these things get fixed, and that was a great fix for me. So, I was one of the things I wrote down is alignment can be a big thing, alignment, your cranial sacral pulse, and all that. Well, one of the factors that kept getting me misregulated was my autonomic nervous system would be too much fight or flight mode, so when I'd get stressed, it would be just, you'd go into this one mode, and you'd imbalance your body, so I think the tuning for thing is wild, and that brings up also music, like, which is also one of the great regulators, so it's I'm writing down, was, you know, we talked about tech being the great dysregulator, but I think the ultimate great regulator, of course, is sleep, sleep, and rest, and giving ourselves permission to rest as parents, not overdoing it. Time in nature, of course, sunlight outside, especially UV light in the morning. If it's not a great, like today, it's not a great day here in Connecticut, but I have, I got this reptile lamp that I used to use. So, they have reptiles have, like, the warming basking, and then they have a UV lamp for calcium absorption, and we need that too, right? So I use that, having time with regulated people, people that really charge you, fill you up, and love you, and hug you, and if you can sing with them, it's even more awesome, right? That's super regulated, or march, or move with them, even just the earth's magnetic field. This is a cool thing. A tech I have, this is a Philip Stein sleep band, and it's an antenna for the earth's magnetic field, or the Schumann resins. So that's cool. Yeah, so that's super cool. And you're not using something artificial signal, you're using, you're amplifying what's natural, and I love this thing for sleep. It helps with melatonin and grounding, right? So, grounding and just stillness itself, just quiet and having some space to have some coherence, good music, reading movement on. Um, like having a little bit of structure and routine, sometimes not too much, but like maybe there's a play time or cleaning time, or whatever, so there's a little bit of expectation, so everything's not chaos and random.
Len Arcuri 30:11
Well, that's the, that's the key. Having less chaos in your life is always a good thing.
Peter Sullivan 30:15
Yeah, exactly. Because the digital stuff is chaos, unfortunately, it looks beautiful. More play, more flow time, and I think I don't know if you've studied flow time at all, but it's, you know, one of the things that's interrupting us a lot. So, flow time is when you've had more than 20 minutes on one single thing, you're unit tasking, you can be two and a half times more effective, and these things are interrupting us all the time and screwing up our flow states, and also when our, when our nervous systems are too jacked up, we're not in flow, so we're trying to get, you know, not too lax and not too dialed up, right, the proper arousal level. And I think my other great regulator to me is like service and purpose, and really I find, like, somebody said this term, if you get nervous, focus on service and serving others, and, and I think a lot of us do that way, and some of us times we serve our kids, and we step forward for that, but we don't want to do it in a way that's sacrificing ourselves, and I don't know, that's my, that was my quick list of great regulators, but there's a lot of other, we talked about trauma, screen time, but I think even like toxins, so VOCs, and you know what's what, a tricky one, smell, so artificial scents, so this is a tricky one, so you've got like bounce and febreze, and all these artificial scents that are really bad VOCs, and to people who are really sensitive, they're just really triggering, and the reason they're triggering is it's the one sense, the smell, sense of smell is the one that goes directly to the limbic brain with no other routing, so you know again if you smell decay or bad food, it's very important, and so making sure that your environment smells good, smells safe is actually key, along with actually the other one I haven't brought up yet is light flicker, so if you watch out for flickering lights, you can go around, go around with your can't read your phone in slow motion mode, and look at all your lights, and then play it back, and you might be able to see lights flickering, and so you might want to, you know, try to use more natural light, and there's different lights that I think the folks, what is it, the Shielded Healing group has a light recommendation thing with less flickered lights, and it's really hard to get good lights that don't flicker and don't have dirty electricity that are low, low voltage, or whatever,
Len Arcuri 32:31
right? And even if you can't do anything like that, just going back to an old incandescent bulb, if you can get a hold of it, would be better than an LED bulb, correct?
Peter Sullivan 32:40
So I think that's exactly, so I say spend the money, and light is light is way more important than you think, and light comes into your eyes and works right with the pineal gland, and is regulating, and can you know, can can regulate you or throw you off, and it's just much more powerful than I thought, than anybody thought.
Len Arcuri 32:58
Yep, Cass, any comments on the smell content, I
Cass Arcuri 33:02
think it was, so I spent what, over 20 years in fragrance, so like this is like my kind of specialty, and something that I, I only bring essential oils into our house, and I, that's all I brought in since where I was diagnosed, because it's really important, because if you think about your bombarding, you know, we can't see what our phones are doing to us, and so this is where I think a lot of times people discount it, like you had said, you know, you know, the a couple people that you knew where the dads ended up dying of cancer. I've had some people in my life who, one woman I worked with, her Crohn's went crazy, and she went investigating their house, and I guess two weeks before, when the flare started, her husband had put boosters in, and so she didn't have awareness to it, turned the boosters off, the Crohn's went back into kind of equilibrium. We had another person that let, and I know their child ended up having a seizure issue that had recently developed at the same time boosters were also put into their house, and so this is where I think sometimes we don't pay attention to the things we can't see. However, those things can be absolutely causing us harm. I breaks my heart when I keep seeing all these people walking around with, like, what the earbuds in, because I'm just like, and they're not even on their phone, and I'm just like, what is that doing? You know, these watches that people wear, I'm like, what are these doing to their system that they don't even have awareness to, and this is where these future generations of kids, I'm really concerned with, because how they're, you know, they're role modeled by, you know, this is kind of the parents setting that role model for these kids, but we don't know what this downstream impact is going to be on everyone.
Peter Sullivan 34:49
Yeah, I mean, it's just, yeah, those dysregulate you so badly that you're going to get inner ear inflammation, you're not going to hear your hearing is any kind of muddle, you're not going to know your voice is going to change. Your autonomic nervous system is going to change. There's actually even a magnetic link between the two, magnetic fields linking going through your brain. So, I just, every time I see those people, I'm just like, well, that my expectations for what you're going to be able to do in life aren't go down about tenfold. But there's one thing about air quality that came up, what I was thinking about, and I just learned about this. Well, first of all, there's a big link between mold in the air, too, and all these things, fresh air, but one of the elements that came up for me, which is so interesting, I was reading the book Breath, so breath is one of the great regulators, too, right? So, breathing and yoga and movement, and it's one of the main things that can help our autonomic nervous system. It's one of the things I was doing some breath work for trauma, and it was phenomenally interesting, but so we know about the amygdala being kind of a fear center in autism, and in kids with on the spectrum, it's a little more hyperactive and developed, because you know that they're in that state most of their lives, basically. Well, apparently that's not the only fear center, so there are some people who've had damaged amygdalas, and they don't get afraid of anything, but they found out there is one center that can get them into a panic, which is, I think, in the ponds. This book that, forgetting the guys, did David Nestor, or something, Nestor, who did breath,
Len Arcuri 36:13
James Nestor, yeah, James Nestor.
Peter Sullivan 36:15
Thank you. In the ponds, there's apparently a co sensor that, so when the co level in the blood gets high, the body is like crap, you know? I gotta, I'm panicked, I need a breath, you know, that sort of thing. So that can, that can still take people who've got a damaged amygdala and make them panic and have a panic attack. So very few people are measuring co levels in their house, and especially if you're a teacher, co levels in your classroom or your work environment, so when things get kind of stuffy and people are getting a little whatever, when the co levels above 600 you are in it's a lower cognitive functioning is occurring, and that's pretty common, actually. So it's usually about 400 outside, and it doesn't take much to get it in a sealed up house to get it above 600 My house used to go above 1000 all the time until I had like a little alarm set off, and then I'd have to be opening windows and playing around with stuff. This house breathes a little bit better, so I haven't had a problem in this home, but worthwhile to measure your co sensor, and there's a couple different sensors you can get online, yeah.
Len Arcuri 37:25
I'd be curious, because I'd be interested in getting one of those as well. Not something I never really thought about measuring, but it makes a lot of sense. So,
Peter Sullivan 37:37
yeah, if your body's about to tip, if your body's easily tipping into like a state of overload, you know, it's you've got the EMF, you've got the smell, you've got all your emotional levels, the trauma, all the stuff, and then it's just yet another thing, and that's a pretty primitive one, and so, you know, good to take a break outside, open a window here and there, and it's good to get, yeah, the air, like, there's supposed to be like natural scents from trees and all kinds of things that trees release and everything that make our bodies kind of just go like you know we want that element of nature to be inside. I think one thing that started this whole concept for me was I saw went to a talk at a biodynamic farm in 2009 and I think the book was called No Child Left in Inside, and it was about, you know, outside good, inside bad, and you know, I'm like, okay, whatever, but that's to me, that's just a horrible design failure, which is you're spending x amount of money, sometimes millions, on a house that's not as good as a tent outside, okay, so you know, there's there's a little bit of a problem there, and so, what are the factors, what are the good factors from outside that need to come in, and you know, what are the bad factors in a house that need to go away? And that's it. So, that we, in theory, we should be able to be better than nature.
Cass Arcuri 38:52
The status, like the inside air, is 10 times more polluted than the outside air. You know, this is where you were talking about, like, VOCs before. So, yeah, you'll have VOCs from, you know, plugins or candles, and those kind of things, laundry detergents, especially now that they say what can be fresh up to three months, like what is going on if it can stay fresh up to that long, right? But then things like your carpets, all of these things have off gas, you know, furniture nowadays, these off-gassing properties, so really kind of paying attention. I remember when we had to buy a dresser for our daughter, like I returned one because it smelled from an off-gassing perspective, and I went and I ended up putting my head into this furniture in the showroom to smell what it would smell like, because I didn't want those extra VOCs. So it's kind of like when you're able to kind of pay attention to this, I've never heard it from this co perspective, but love that other measure, because it's really important, and it also helps, will probably help parents too, thinking about, like, okay, my kids' behaviors are more like this in this environment versus this environment, so it's like, okay, What are the. Differences here, and how can you kind of minimize these impacts,
Peter Sullivan 40:04
exactly? You know, I got ahead, I got to have dinner with Andy Groves, who was one of the founders of Intel, one of the founders of Intel, who ran Intel, was Time magazine of the year, and it was talking to him, and he had, we were both doing environmental health, we're both doing, he was working on Parkinson's. He had Parkinson's and died of that, and I was talking to him, and I was trying to introduce a little bit of environmental health to him, and, and I just.. it just struck me, what this is one of the most brilliant men on the planet, and but he couldn't get his head around now, he, he knew in a chip fab that contamination in a chip fab could cause problems with the production and the quality, and he knew you had to tightly regulate that, and even static electricity, which is another dysregulator, static clothing, or whatever, could cause problems, right? So, but he never applied that same thought process that you have to create like a clean room for humans as well, he never looked at pesticides use, or he never tried to change his diet at all, and I was, it was mind-boggling to me, because, like, you are one of the best people, the world, at doing this, and you've not just taken these concepts over and said, you know, this is like, and I think I've mentioned this, this in my talks, but I don't know if I mentioned it yours, but it's like, if that, if one out of every 30 iPhones was dysfunctional off the line, you people would be getting fired. There'd be quality control issues going on. People, they would sort it out very quickly. Well, we've had this going on for decades with autism, and is it getting sorted out quickly? No, we're not, you know, paying attention to what's actually changed and doing the sort of the simple sort of things we would do for a car manufacturing or automotive, whatever, cell phone or chip manufacturing, we're not doing that for our own children, and that's just really sad, that's really lame. It's the same laws of physics apply, so you should think of your body as like an electrical, your body's electrical and, like, like a radio or whatever, and it has all these things that impact it, including, you know, inflammation, you know, is slows down the flow of everything, like a speed bump, so that's, you know, another factor that plays in here and can dysregulate,
Cass Arcuri 42:14
and inflammation is 90, you know, causes 95% of all diseases, so by minimizing that inflammation piece, it's, you know, what - what the positive impact can be, which, you know, from the parents that Len and I have coached, and from what we've witnessed, you know, in our own family, it's amazing when you can kind of empower the parent to make different decisions, decisions that they get to choose, but when they're informed, what can happen is game changing. Lynn, what was the ATEC drop that we just witnessed in 12 weeks?
Len Arcuri 42:47
75% drop,
Cass Arcuri 42:48
75% in 12 weeks. A tech dropping like incredible. And this is just parents kind of stepping into their power, realizing the impact they have, and then choices that they can make to support their daughter, like things can happen fast if parents are really kind of ready for it.
Peter Sullivan 43:05
Well, and even, and in autism, and it happens not all the time, it's more rare, but we've had some people do our protocol, and had the kids, we've had nonverbal kids speak after a couple days of sleeping well on the protocol, and even an overnight change, they had an older kid in the 20s, all they did was turn the Wi-Fi off at night, and the caretaker said, "What did you do this child? He's a completely different child. So, and that's inflammation, that's related to inflammation, but there's a couple other quick inflammation trips, tricks. One is there's an encephalitis protocol, or brain inflammation protocol, for the magnets, which is like the black magnet here, and the red magnet here, kind of on the backs of the head, right here. So that's, and the frequency specific microcurrent uses 40 hertz, which again I think works with the glial cells to create, you know, get rid of infiltrate, get rid of inflammation, and so you can then target use that 40 hertz and target it on brain spinal cord, you know, whatever, and get some pretty rapid reductions in inflammation, and then because that's so, yeah, so you get, you can get stuck in these states, that's the problem, is it's not just a trauma, it's not just getting dysregulated, but it's getting dysregulated and stuck in the gutter, it's like you're off, you're off-roading it now. So, frequently, yeah, you get Trump. You, I think of it as being traumatized by the technology, and then just like a soldier who you take them off the battlefield, they're not going to just quickly snap back and recover. They need a little bit of work, so a lot of that work on trauma, I think you know, applies to everybody else. A lot of the work that people are doing with MDMA and even psilocybin, EMDR, all these kind of advanced things, and I'm even trying to do a protocol with the magnets for trauma, which I've had some decent success with, the breath work for trauma. Well, they're the, the actually the frequency specific microcurrent has had, they say they have a. 100% success with post traumatic stress syndrome, even long term chronic post traumatic stress system. I'm like, wow, okay, I've got to buy one of these things and play with it. I'm working with my doctor, but I need more time to play.
Cass Arcuri 45:14
Well, that will be our next conversation, Peter.
Peter Sullivan 45:16
Well,
Len Arcuri 45:17
we've sure covered a lot of ground, and I guess, but from a context standpoint, I think you just mentioned, Peter, about being stuck, and I think a lot of people, even with awareness of the fact that the tech can be very dysregulating, they're stuck in terms of even knowing where to start. So, what you've shared is a lot of the reasons why technology can be dysregulating in all the different forms, and why it's worth putting things in airplane mode and playing better defense, but then you know there's a lot that you can do, and what I think, with all these ideas and suggestions that you're making, it all comes under the banner of, as you alluded to, you want to bring in the natural environment indoors as much as possible, so that's where you know this. Yes, there's a lot of suggestions in this episode, and you don't have to run out and do all them, but this just shows you how much of a menu you have that with awareness you can make these kind of seemingly small changes that cumulatively may make a huge difference.
Peter Sullivan 46:21
Yeah, and even just getting the kids outside, we used to have a rule with the kids wanted to watch TV for an hour, they had to go outside for an hour. So we
Len Arcuri 46:30
tried that, they're not enough hours in a day now,
Peter Sullivan 46:32
not enough hours in the day, for yeah, but I mean, yeah, again, I don't want people to get overwhelmed by the amount of things we presented here, but everything's like a menu, find the find the things that resonate with you and that you can do easily, and you're just trying to create more space for yourself first, so that you can have a little bit more capacity, and then use that extra space to then take the next step, and then you work on the air quality, whatever you think is next.
Len Arcuri 46:58
Yep. No, there's so much that you can do, and yeah, the show notes for this will be very extensive, and otherwise you're with Clear Light Ventures. We'll include the link to your site as well. I know there's like a lot of great resources, videos, and then otherwise, Peter, again, thank you for sharing your voice. You have a really unique perspective that I think is just super useful for our listeners. So, thanks for spending time with us today, you know. Thank you, guys, so much.
Cass Arcuri 47:24
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