Recovery Discovery by Show Up and Stay

Recovery Discovery | What if our gut holds the key to sustainable recovery?

• DeAnn Knighton • Season 4 • Episode 10

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Topics: 

  • Impact of Gut Health on Addiction
  • Balancing Body, Mind, and Heart
  • Future Directions and Stop Circuit

In this week's episode, DeAnn and Craig record a follow-up to our last episode featuring Adam Sud and the power of nutrition as a tool for sustainable recovery. They discuss the impact of diet and exercise on recovery. Craig emphasizes the importance of a balanced caloric environment, encompassing the types of food consumed and the utilization of calories. They explore the role of the microbiome in health, noting studies on cocaine's effect on glycine levels and how gut bacteria can influence addiction. DeAnn shares her personal recovery journey, emphasizing the significance of the balance of heart, mind, and body and the role the enneagram played in building this understanding.


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Music and Audio Production by Katie Hare.
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DeAnn Knighton:

Hello, welcome back. You may have noticed that Craig wasn't on the episode with Adam, so he has had a little chance to catch up on the conversation that Adam and I had, and we wanted to talk a little bit about some of his perspectives on that discussion. So nice to have you back on the show, Craig.

Craig Knighton:

Hey, DeAnn. Hey, thanks for covering for me. For everyone's benefit, I was out for 10 days traveling to Alaska. I've never been before, and actually coming back from that trip, and especially the end of the trip, there's so much nature. I mean, traveling to Alaska is all about being in nature. And we ended the trip with three days in deannon League Park and and had a chance to literally hike our butts off, and we're exhausted, and that's just such a even though it's tiring, it's such a rejuvenating thing for my wife and I to do. So it was kind of cool to come back and catch up and hear the episode with Adam. So I thought it would be fun to talk a little bit more about what we heard there and and then there are a few things that it made me think about that I think are worth kind of discussion as a after thought. So what do you think? Dive in.

DeAnn Knighton:

Yeah. Dive in. And, yeah. I think it also can tee up some of the places we want to go, because there was a lot of things that it spoke on the dopamine episode that we released prior to Adam's episode, I think dovetails really nicely with a lot of what we talk about with Adam. But there's a there's several other threads, I think, as well that deserves some further exploration. Well, the first

Craig Knighton:

thing was that it's, I think it's a little easy to get too focused just on dopamine. Is like, Oh, that explains addiction, right? It's just the dopamine go circuit thing, because there are so many more elements to it that I thought came out well in Adam's discussion, like this idea of caloric environment, and the idea that, yes, it's about the total number of calories you take in, but it's so much richer than that. It's it's even where those calories come from. It's the how you balance the sources of fat, sugar and protein and other things that we we need in our diet. It's the kinds of food and the number of different things that we eat to create that kind of blended diet. And it's also, I thinking back to my recent experience doing a lot of exercise in nature too. I think there's even something to be said for it, relating to how you spend those calories too. Like your caloric environment is not only about your intake, but it's about how you use that energy that you've eaten, and when you use that energy to hike in nature with people you love, there's just no greater joy in doing something like that. So that really jumped out at me. I like that idea.

DeAnn Knighton:

Yeah, me too. I enjoyed his explanation of that. And I bet if he was here, he would probably agree in what you were saying, because he did really sum it up as in terms of that study, as a pretty broad scope of what makes up that environment. And so I would think how you would utilize it definitely makes sense.

Craig Knighton:

I also had some recent thoughts about how that kind of balance is its own form of I'm going to connect it to recent topics we've had where we talked about spirituality, right? Because I see that. I see balance in spirituality being very tightly intertwined. I think there is a lot that can be said about how nature and community creates a form of spirituality that is definitely rejuvenating and increases our resilience and probably contributes to better long term recovery. I felt that coming through in Adam's conversation.

DeAnn Knighton:

I know we're going to talk a little bit later, maybe about my connection with some of this and and the connection of food and body and it 100% has a spiritual component to it. You'll see when we get into it. And I, I really love what you're saying about the balance piece, because I think that the balance piece becomes the trigger for helping you to manage yourself a little bit, maybe parent yourself a little bit, because if you understand the balance and the formula, then you know and understand why certain things are going to give you a long term benefit. And you know it like to your core, not because somebody told you, but because you actually believe that it will. And that was the biggest difference for me, because I was told for a long time. I mean, how many times do we tell people eat, break and exercise, right? I mean, that it's almost painful to hear sometimes. However, there was a pivot for me from like Just hearing that as noise to like actually feeling it as part of what I needed. To get better. So I think it's really important. So let's talk a little bit more about some of the connections you saw in Adam's work, some of the things that you've been thinking about.

Craig Knighton:

Well, probably the biggest thing is, and this is going to get a little bit fringy, I have been reading a lot about new studies that start to look at the relationship of our gut, right, our microbiome, as it's called, and our health in general, and various aspects of health. And just to make sure that everybody's clear on what I'm talking about here, I'm talking about basically how our stomachs are full of these various different microbes, bacteria and other things, right, that are all involved in our digestion process, and all of those little animals that are living in our gut create this biome, this biological environment that ends up affecting how we feel. It ends up affecting our brain functions. It ends up affecting how we metabolize food and convert it into energy. And there's all these secondary effects that the microbiome seems to have, and I think it's one of the more promising forms of research that will move us in a scientific way, away from thinking only of chemicals as drugs, to also thinking about how we can influence our health through directly affecting our microbiome, or even in some respects, transplanting healthy bacteria into our stomachs, so that our stomachs become healthier, so that we become healthier, right? That this sounds wishy washy. It sounds like, Oh, I'm going to eat granola and then I'll be healthier. But there's actually an increasing amount of science backing the idea that you can affect your health through what you eat, through the chemicals that you take into your body and how that affects your gut,

DeAnn Knighton:

definitely right. And there's connections with serotonin and like depression elements, but also you can just imagine, like the havoc of long term alcohol use, what that does to your stomach and your your digestion, and how getting that back regulated can help just kind of with that process of feeling like a more full human I really liked what Adam talked about and the truth that he spoke about his experience of starting that sobriety journey and realizing, like, I don't want to be sober for this. I have a problem. If this is what sobriety looks like, I don't have it. I don't I'm not motivated enough, right? And so looking at these other elements are what kind of helped turn that for him, and I think that that's interesting to think of other people in this journey, if there are ways that they can get kind of a leg up or some help with something, just to start moving that incrementally closer to overall feeling better. It's hard to say how we would measure exactly the impact of it, but, and I know you like, there's got to be a way. But you know, those incremental things are going to contribute to the bigger picture of, Do I have something out there that is worth staying sober for, and a life and a body and health and the things that are worth staying sober for,

Craig Knighton:

right? So the when I zoom all the way out, like you just did, I get a little bit overwhelmed, because it's so complex that it's kind of hard to follow. Like I, how do I see that? I, how do I see cause and effect and all of that, and how do I figure out what really mattered? And there's so many variables, right? So I thought maybe I would just talk you through, like, one specific set of studies and an example of how the gut and brain affect each other, and studies related done in mice, granted, and not tried yet in humans, but how studies of the impact of substances on their biology show some of the secondary effects and things that happen that affect the gut, and then how the that gut changes affect the body and the brain, and then how the effects on the brain create this vicious cycle that feeds the problem and that caused it in the first place, and so it just sort of gets out of control and becomes full blown addiction. This case is actually relates to cocaine, which isn't the specific substance we talk about the most, but it certainly is very similar to alcohol and its effect on the release of dopamine. In fact, it releases a lot more dopamine than alcohol does. But the other thing that it does is have an impact in our bodies on something called glycine. Do you if you ever heard of glycine? You know what it is? About it? Well. May describe it, not from a like a chemical point of view, but but more like how having it or not having it affects us. So it's an amino acid. I'm not even sure what that really is, but it is one. But what's more important is that if you have a glycine deficiency in your body, it's not even considered essential. But if you're deficient in glycine. There's all these other side effects that that pop out, including neural dysfunction, like the brain fog. It very clearly is described as a brain fog that can result you can have fatigue, you feel sluggish, you have difficulty recovering your body recovering from injury or exercise, that kind of thing. There's all these other just sort of feel bad, kind of side effects and low glycine levels. So why is that important? Well, it turns out that there's this chain reaction that cocaine use has on bodies of mice, and I believe also in people, where, if you use cocaine, it also one of the things it does is affects the chemistry. It releases chemicals, or changes the chemical composition in your stomach, such that there's a shift in the bacteria in your stomach. And bacteria, bad bacteria, like E coli and other I think they're called, like proteo bacteria, tend to flourish because of the cocaine use. And these bad bacteria, one of the things they do is eat glycine, so your body is busy eating food and trying to make glycine by digesting it from your food, and instead of it making it into your body, the bacteria, bad bacteria in your stomach are eating eating it up, right? So your glycine levels drop in your stomach and in your body, and eventually in your brain as well, right the your whole body becomes glycine deficient, if you have too much of this bad bacteria in your stomach, and the fatigue and brain fog that results from low glycine levels really inhibits your stock circuit, right? Like what they see in mice who become glycine deficient is suddenly they are just moving almost spastically, like they're searching, and they're clearly going through like visible seeking behavior as they're trying to find something to make this awful feeling go away, and especially if that's something they can Find in their environment is cocaine to make the awful feeling go away, they just almost immediately get stuck in this even more aggressive, addictive loop that they're in, right and then it just spirals worse. The more cocaine you have, the lower your glycine levels drop, the more inhibited your stop circuit is and brain function, and the more fatigued you are, and the more cocaine you want to consume to try to feel better. And what's fascinating is how they demonstrated both the cause and then sort of the effect by reversing it. They They also figured out that they could modify those same bacteria so that they don't consume glycine, and they replace the bacteria in the mice's stomach with this modified bacteria that doesn't consume glycine, and the mice return to normal, their their spastic running around, seeking behavior stopped, and especially if We don't know what mice are thinking and feeling, but if you interpret that behavior as craving and seeking behavior in the in the animal, it really looks promising that you might be able to limit or control that sort of craving and seeking behavior just simply by introducing either modified bad bacteria or healthier bacteria into your stomach to help moderate the cravings. Yeah, that's so isn't that

DeAnn Knighton:

crazy? Yeah, and there's natural ways I'm sure, to do it

Craig Knighton:

absolutely so it doesn't happen. It doesn't depend the treatment. Doesn't depend on using genetically modified bacteria. So if that's not your thing, it wouldn't necessarily require that you might even be able to do it just by eating the right kind and amount of probiotics to be able to shift the microbiome in your stomach back to healthy levels, or some form of natural transplant, frankly, of healthy bacteria into your stomach to fix it.

DeAnn Knighton:

Yeah, and then it's maintenance of that as well, right? Like to be able to sustain that impact. And you know, it makes me think too. I wonder if there is sort of relatedly, if this ties in at all with the idea around the power of. Absorption. That's something that I've been really fascinated by. It recently, from the standpoint of the effectiveness of certain like prescribed drugs to help people with depression and anxiety, and how much absorption plays a drastic role in the impact they have on that person and whether they feel the effect. And so I don't know how much there's tied there, but I'm thinking of like, yeah, the gut has to play a role in the absorption piece.

Craig Knighton:

I absolutely does. Yeah, this might sound like pseudoscience, but I take a specific formulation of vitamins that's supposed to help with macular degeneration. And what's interesting is not the vitamins themselves, but what's interesting is that my optometrist focuses on measuring the absorption rates of those vitamins, and he knows specifically when in your day you should take it to maximize the absorption, and it's within 30 minutes after your eat your dinner meal, and they can measure the absorption of the chemicals through a device you hold in your hand that uses like conductivity of your skin to measure absorption rate of the vitamins. And so they can prove that through changing your behavior and when you took the vitamin, you increase the absorption into your body, and they can measure the increased absorption. So I agree with you. It's fascinating, and it's it's measurable. All of these things are things that you can measure about our bodies, right? And you can measure your glycine levels. In fact, one of the things that is true, but they don't understand yet, is they do know that alcohol, especially at high levels like binging, definitely causes significant decreases in glycine a few days or a day after the alcohol is used, and so your glycine levels do drop when you use alcohol. We don't exactly know it's not like cocaine, where you they can connect the dots and point to exactly why it happens. And we don't know if it goes through the gut, brain access or not yet, but I'm sure they'll try to figure that out. Closely related to that there's, there's, weirdly enough, in studying glycine, they've been able to determine that glycine has a deterrent effect, a protective effect on your liver, and that higher glycine levels will help protect your liver from alcohol by ensuring that more of the alcohol is processed in your stomach, instead of making it into your liver and then doing the damage that does to your liver. So there's even protective effects of higher glycine levels. And that shows promise for trying to improve digestion, maintain higher glycine levels overall, and just overall, make us less susceptible to alcohol as a drug.

DeAnn Knighton:

Yeah, you know. And I'm thinking now just of the amino acid impact and my understanding, and again, I don't know. Now I feel like I might need to look this up and check myself that there is a correlation with stress management the adrenal system to some degree. And it does make me think about that connection. I've heard phrased many times, and I've repeated it many times, that drinking alcohol is like pouring foreign gasoline on your anxiety, right? Because it inhibits on the back end of it, and the response that you three days after is a lack of ability to manage and handle stress and anxiety in ways that you are capable of. And so it feels worse, and then it makes you want

Craig Knighton:

to feel worse, and then you want to drink again in order to try to feel better, in order to Yeah, you can see how the addictive cycle develops, and we're not even talking about dopamine. None of this has to do with dopamine. It's it's like a slower response through your body that occurs over days and weeks and generally cycles out of control, or might, or maybe in some people, it doesn't right, just depending on all of the factors you just described.

DeAnn Knighton:

Yeah, it makes me want to look at the ingredients on the hangover cures that I see at 711 you know, because I'm like, I wonder if this is utilizing the idea

Craig Knighton:

right, which might just be glycine shots, yeah, I don't know maybe it is,

DeAnn Knighton:

but yeah, that's interesting. I yeah, I think that there's a lot there. And I think the tricky part with all of this is what Adam was talking about, how shocking it was for him to realize how little research on nutrition and recovery had been done, and it is shocking to hear, but then also, after being around this for a few years, it's not shocking to hear,

Craig Knighton:

in a weird way, though, his point was so good when he said, Look, you know, when you're in inpatient treatment, one of the things that you have to do is feed the people that are there. So if you are. Just careful about how you feed them. Why wouldn't you feed them in a way that ensures that you increase the likelihood of their recovery or maybe help them develop new caloric environments and new habits? Right? New habits? What harm could happen? You have to feed them anyway, so yeah, why wouldn't you just try that absolutely makes so much sense,

DeAnn Knighton:

it does, and there's a similar not to go down another rabbit hole too deep, but there's a lot of in the media about this right now. That's why I want to bring it up. But there is a lot about the utilization of recovery from substance and the elimination of tobacco use in those programs as a way to benefit the overall health of people who are in recovery. However, there's there. It's tricky, right? Because would you rather take everything away? You can't take everything away at the same time, and you

Craig Knighton:

can't take nicotine, caffeine and everything else away while you're also trying to and why would you

DeAnn Knighton:

do that? And if it's stopping somebody from doing heroin, then please smoke the cigarette right now, right there is a counterbalance to that insurance. However, it there is also the flip side, which is you're kind of doing this thing anyway. Why not increase, you know, all of the factors that are going to help you stay in recovery. And there is a correlation with tobacco use and long term abstinence, basically,

Craig Knighton:

yeah, well, you mentioned this earlier, but maybe reflect a little bit on what all of this is like. Has been like for you, like you're more than five years into recovery. Clearly, in long term recovery, I'm I certainly recall very clearly how important diet and exercise was to you, and that in those first few months and first year of of recovery. But what's how does all of this? How did listening to Adam relate to your own personal experience in long term recovery?

DeAnn Knighton:

Yeah, there's so much I can say here that I have to be careful. This could be probably three episodes, because it is such an important part

Unknown:

of maybe it should be, maybe it should be, but

DeAnn Knighton:

let me, let me just see what I can summarize here that I think applies. My first year of recovery was very unpleasant, and the only thing that ever helped me feel just slightly better at that time was going to yoga. And every single day I would go, I don't want to go, and I would go because I knew it wouldn't make me feel worse. I felt so bad that I knew anything that would help me feel just a little bit better was worth it, and so it gave me this like investment in it that I had never had before, right where there wasn't anything else to fill that hole for me, except for that. And so I leaned into just pushing myself to move my body as much as I could. And I got by that way, you know, and then ultimately I started feeling progressively a lot better, and my health overall improved, and all kinds of benefits came from it. But it really was like I was so grasping for anything to sustain me. I didn't have a lot in my life at that time, too, in terms of, like, social connection and things like that. And so, yeah, it was, it plugged a big hole, and it became a big part of the story for me. So that that's one piece of it, the other piece I have to mention. And I don't know how much you and I have ever talked about this before, exercise, diet, food has had a massive impact on my entire life, right? And there's a lot of elements that go into it. Part of that is being a woman and the connection of my struggles with weight and acceptance and bullying that took part for me in my high school years, and a whole lots of ways that my body and my obsession with my body took over my life at a lot of different times yet, to no avail. Yet, I wasn't healthy yet, I didn't feel better. However, this thing controlled me for a large aspect of my life as I have begun this work over the last seven years, and worked a lot with other women, there is a huge correlation to body image, weight management and all of that, and alcohol use and drug use. And there's, there's a whole element there. It is such an important part of my journey, because it was also a part of me coming into myself a little bit more and not disassociating as much as I have learned to do, because I have learned to ignore my body for most of my life, like don't think about it, don't look at it. Oh, you're hungry. Too bad. Oh, you just ate too much. You have a stomach ache. Too bad. I just learned to shut it off. And so now, all of a sudden, I'm in this place where I can actually start paying attention to it. And there was something actually very spiritual about that for me. Yeah, and, and, and the biggest piece that I can speak of, and then I I'll stop after this. But the biggest thing is that balance piece that you talked about. So one of my little side journeys. Early in recovery, and I would recommend it for anyone who kind of likes this kind of stuff. I'm not trying to get Woo. Woo on you. But there is something here, and it has to do with the Enneagram, which a lot of people might be familiar with. But the Enneagram is nine different subtypes of personality, essentially, that are based on, like, a core need that drive that personality type, and people who lean towards that, yes, it puts people in buckets. It's not it's not holistic all of those things. But within that, you have these three categories, body, mind and heart types. And yet, there are people who are just typically more wired in particular ways. I have liked this because I identify myself as a head type, little bit more in the anxiety category, the worry category, I probably put you in head type two, a little bit more on the intellectual there's a there's a five category, which I feel like maybe kind of encompasses you a little bit. Not that I want to put you in too much of a box. I'm more of a seven in the head type, which leans more towards even more anxiety. So I learned in my recovery how much time I had spent trying to think my way out of everything my entire life had been thinking from back to like a little kid. I can remember that that is how I functioned, and that in that I had ignored these other elements of myself, and so heart type is definitely where you're going to find people who are just sort of more naturally socially connected and intend to get a lot of energy out of that social interaction to the point that they'll forego anything for it, that they're so driven by that, that it sometimes can get them into trouble because they don't take care of their own needs, right? They give so much of themselves that they don't take care of themselves. And then that has a downside too, right? All of this has an upside and a downside, and then the other the body type, right? Are people who are kind of wired in their body. They respond to anger like, Okay, quickly, right? Yes, there is, and there's three types that kind of fit within that. This triad I found so helpful for me now that I know myself as a head type, I recognize and understand that getting in my body and getting in my heart are not things that naturally happen for me, that there has to be an element of effort for me to get there. I know I'm going to spend plenty of time in my head every day. Sure that part is no problem. I don't know if I'm going to spend time in my body, because, especially if I'm too in my head, being in my body scares me, because then I'm going to be thinking about things I've been trying to avoid thinking about. But I also know, like in my core, I have seen how much like, if I'm balanced, and I create opportunities to be in my body every single day, and I get in a pattern of that, that my overall outlook on life is just better. And yeah, same thing with heart. So heart is an interesting one, because I can think compassion all day long, and I can feel it too, but there is an element of some of the detachment I have from scary emotions where I have to force myself to be present. This is about the here and now, totally, yeah, this is about, like, I am here, and I'm with my brother and my sister in a room, and I haven't seen them in a year, and this, like, feels so good, and I'm feeling the joy of that connection, and not just thinking about the joy of that connection. And I'm taking a moment to, like, acknowledge the physical presence, or like, I have to actually do it. I have to, I have to say, like, folks, stop for a minute, like, what's happening, and then get myself into my heart. This may sound super cheesy and crazy,

Craig Knighton:

makes sense to me that it worked for me. Nature is one of the most natural gateways to art, right? Because if you just get outside and get into nature, that presence, becoming present with nature happens very naturally. I've been doing a lot more with plants and growing, and as soon as I get into the garden, I'm immediately in that place in what it's like, this great hack, right? Because you don't have to think your way into your body or into your heart. It just happens naturally by being outside, working on plants.

DeAnn Knighton:

And I have found, and I love it too, and I have, actually, that's one of my little treasure things, where I have looked back and gone my mom and dad knew what they were talking about in some way when they told me, just like, get out and do stuff in the yard, because, you know, they valued that, and they didn't value it for the same reasons we're talking about right now, but they just knew that it helped them feel better overall. Sure, they just had a knowing that it was good for them. And I. Have felt connected to them in that practice, for sure. And the other thing I want to say with nature is, I have to give my little spiel for pets. Pets are a huge piece for this, for me too, right? There is something about this, like living being that's in my home that if I do need to connect with, like life force, I can feel my dog breathe and I can just be like, Okay, there's a breath or or, obviously kids help, oh, sure, and especially if you focus on being present with them. But I have to make an effort to do that, because otherwise I can be like, Oh yeah, just over here.

Craig Knighton:

So my happy place is a cat on my lap. Yeah. And cats, when they really settle in and really stretch out, they just like they just totally let go. There is no stress in them, in any way, shape or form, they're completely happy. And it just sort of radiates into your body when they do that. It's a great thing.

DeAnn Knighton:

Yeah, that really is my little spirituality hack right there.

Craig Knighton:

I love it. We'll have to do a whole episode on it, yeah, let me make a quick transition to sort of because I think this is a great integrating conversation of several things that we've talked about, and then where it takes us. I think so much of why some people bend and other people break has to do with this. What's happening with your here and now and stop circuit and those things failing you in a way that means you don't recover or don't have the resilience that other people have. And so I think that's a good topic to dive into next to kind of focus on the stop circuit and its function and dysfunction, and what are the chemicals involved in managing all of how we feel in our bodies and in our minds, and how that affects the neurotransmission and and health of our brain, right? And and that includes things like serotonin and oxytocin, the love right? Chemical, right? The love hormone. All of those things are huge influencers on on how we feel and our state of mind. And I think are a big part of what help us just be calm and yes and feel safe and be in our body and not hurt and and be sated right, be be satiated in a way that allows us to just stop, to not need to go anywhere or do anything or seek anything, to try to feel better. Just I

DeAnn Knighton:

think that all like plays in really well, and it seems like a great direction.

Craig Knighton:

So thank you. Work on that soon. Thank you. It's good to be back. Good to talk to you. Good to see you. Bye.